Big Tech is using layoffs to crush worker power | Hacker News Reader

Big Tech is using layoffs to crush worker power

latimes.com

321 pointslisper451 comments

Right before COVID-19 stay at home order in Chicago, a bunch of improvisers who preformed at the popular i.o theater put together a list of demands which basically asked for a bunch of changes to make the lives of performers better. They were not going to perform until those changes were made.

The owner didnt respond for a few days and then said, "Hey! Heard you. Great valid concerns. But I'm actually shutting the theater down." i.o was closed for some period of time (1+ year) and then came back. The changes asked for were not made. Performers were happy just to get on stage again.

I think about that a lot when I see people making demands. Sometimes companies can/will just say no or worse find some reason to let the person go. It's frustrating but as the individual its so hard to get any meaningful change when you have no real power.

This is sadly why you need political power. People with money can afford WAY longer then you to just say "nah..."

The power to compel others is dangerous.

Having zero power is vastly more dangerous.

> The power to compel others is dangerous.

When one side already has massive power, it takes massive power to balance it.

It is very rare that an individual will ever have the ability to stand up to a multi-billion dollar company on their own, so they need a powerful union who can actually legitimately threaten that company to be able to keep the company in check.

Either that or the companies need to have their own power strongly curtailed, which can only be done by a powerful government.

Pick your poison.

Great argument against the entirety of capitalism! As an economic system, much like feudalism, capitalism is founded on the bedrock principle of capitalists having extreme power to compel non capitalists into all sorts of behavior.

Or in other words, "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

I think it's less a question of "(politcal) power" than "bargaining power." And bargaining power is not fundamentally about your ability to withhold your labor from one employer but sell it to other employers.

I see what you’re saying, but I must point out that bargaining power is political. The story you’re commenting on is about a group of people working at one location, wanting something more from their employer. The solution to the problem isn’t to leave. Rather, it is to exert influence via collective action to change _that_ situation _there_.

Their mistake was in framing it as collective bargaining. What if they put the owner in the group with them and brainstormed ways to allow everyone to prosper. Casting it as a zero sum interaction--we want more from you and unfortunately you get less--rarely works as well as shared problem solving. At an individual level if they had investigated other opportunities and reported back practices from other employers that matched what they were asking for it would strengthen their case that it would be hard for the employer to attract new employees with their current set of policies.

You have to look at it as a dynamic system or ecosystem. "Us against them" is rarely the most effective framing.

I mean isn't that default position? Everyone has to go into situations like this with eyes open.

If there was no risk to striking or demanding better working conditions, it wouldn't be as rare as it is.

I think everyone is aware that by default "the companies" have more power than the individual or the worker class.

What's unusual is that in 2021 the balance shifted for a little while for the privileged tech worker class. So it's notable that this brief blip was in fact a blip and not the start of a trend.

I don't know how hackernews feels about this given that many here often acts like they are enterpreneurs-in-training, CEOs-in-waiting. Those that secretly (or not so secretly) can't wait to repress others because "<Shrug>, capitalism" rather than working towards a more equitable future (the word itself considered dirty by many here).

Your key point is the last sentence. Individually we have no real power. That's because we are going against corporations and economic systems and governments, which are not individuals. The only way to have a meaningful chance at action is collectively.

It is insanely hard to build a business, and I speak as someone who has built businesses in both tech and franchising (which should theoretically be much more straightforwards). At the primordial stage, before there are reliable revenues, you must have everyone marching to the same drum. If you can’t do what I say, please GTFO because you are actively harming what is already hanging on by a thread. If I can’t fire bad people then I can’t build a business, period. And if you don’t like it, please go create a business model, raise and invest the capital, hire the workers, spend a huge fraction of your waking hours worrying and agonizing over the business, and then deal with entitled people who have way less stake in the game who think they can do it better.

One thing I like about government offices is that the people most motivated to live in insane bureaucracies, punch a card, act entitled, and hurt customers go to work for them. At least it exits a large fraction of nightmare employees from the private sector pool.

Wow. It sounds like you'd benefit from society where the risk of innovating (assuming your business is innovating in some capacity) is not life or death! I daresay a more equitable society would make it so you have an easier time with running your business as well.

You don't have the right to build a business. You have the right to try, of course, but it's not like there's some natural law that you should be able to succeed. So appeals to "it's hanging on by a thread!" don't really do much for me; maybe the viability of your business relies on an imbalance of power vs. your employees, in which case I'd really rather the thread be cut.

Your comment about firing people is kinda flippant. That’s your prerogative as a business owner, but don’t be surprised when your employees treat you just as transactionally as you treat them.

People have the right to freely associate with who they want, ergo the right to build a business.

If they'd like to operate as a sole proprietorship with unlimited liability, perhaps.

If they'd like to operate as a virtual person that insulates personal assets from liability, then the society that grants such a charter absolutely should get to put boundaries on what, as a collective deployer of potentially significant capital, that business is allowed to do.

> maybe the viability of your business relies on an imbalance of power vs. your employees

This is a weird take, as it absolutely does. Kind of how the viability of a military also relies on an imbalance of power between generals and privates. Power structures are fundamentally necessary in productive endeavours.

Two things:

First, power structures are not fundamentally necessary in productive endeavors, but division of responsibility absolutely is. I submit to your authority in situation A, and you in turn submit to my authority in situation B. But insofar as there is a power imbalance, it is a function of how the responsibility is divided, and how often situation A comes up vs situation B.

Is there actually a power imbalance between a general and a private though? There is absolutely a difference in scope of responsibility, but a general, BY THEMSELVES, does not have some special ability to compel that the private does not. The organization inflicts discipline, and its clear that the discipline is necessary for the organization to achieve its goals. But armies that understand the enforcement of discipline as the exercise of a power differential frequently mutiny.

I've read pretty frequently that when you start conceptualizing your marriage in terms of power structures, you may as well draw up the divorce papers, because that endeavor is no longer productive.

> I've read pretty frequently that when you start conceptualizing your marriage in terms of power structures, you may as well draw up the divorce papers, because that endeavor is no longer productive.

This is an interesting conversation, and I think my counterargument would be that governments, marriage, and other such institutions (schools, etc.) are not what I would consider "productive" endeavors, but rather "sociopolitical" ones†. In those cases, I agree that power imbalances are extremely detrimental to their goal.

A military is different in that regard (and so is a corporation). You're right that if the power differential becomes oppressive, you'll have a mutiny, but that's neither here nor there. (The contrapositive is if there's a zero power differential you have anarchy.)

† I'm not sure where courts would stand. They're probably a special case of societal institution that also requires power differentials.

> Is there actually a power imbalance between a general and a private though? There is absolutely a difference in scope of responsibility, but a general, BY THEMSELVES, does not have some special ability to compel that the private does not.

The general is authorized to take the privates life if he does not comply. That’s your special ability to compel.

> The general is authorized to take the privates life if he does not comply. That’s your special ability to compel.

I've never been in the military but uhhhhh I'm pretty sure that's not true.

And I have, and yes it’s completely possible during a time of war. In all other cases you have at least 2 years in jail. Followed by an inability to get a decent job following a discharge under less than honorable conditions. That’s your second ability to compel. Either way your life is over.

You're missing the point. It's not about entitlement or rights. The point the GP is making is that in a true startup situation, either everyone rows in the same direction, or the business fails and everyone loses their job. This is a very different situation from an established large-scale business. You might say: "doesn't matter, worker rights are worker rights, and it's on the entrepreneur to make sure he can meet the legal obligations". That's fine if you feel that way, but you'll get a startup ecosystem more like France than the US though.

I'm not missing the point. I just disagree with it. I don't see "business fails" as an inherently bad thing. Some businesses aren't viable and that's okay!

To use your rowing analogy: presumably, unless someone is actively trying to sabotage the team, everyone is rowing in the same direction. The issue is more, are the rowers being given enough breaks? Are they demanding too many? Is the captain beating them if they don't row fast enough? etc etc. We can quibble about where the lines are. But if the boat can't stay afloat without pushing workers to their breaking points, then maybe the boat deserves to sink.

You've set up a strawman that has nothing to do with what the GP said.

To be clear - IMO any business that is not profitable is hanging by a thread. I invest capital and time in building new entities that I am confident can and will become profitable. I am potentially losing all of my money and time if that doesn't happen, and the vast majority of businesses fail. Creating a successful, sustainable, profitable business is a very difficult (yet rewarding) endeavor that I have had success at in the past. And my point is that anyone who wants to stop me from doing so I need to get rid of ASAP before they put any more of my time and money at risk, and being obligated by the government to keep dead weight around (i.e. unions) is insane, from my perspective as an entrepreneur.

Like I said to the other commenter: I understand the point you’re trying to make, I just disagree with it. If you tell me the only way some business can become profitable is if the employees don’t unionize, what you’re actually saying is that the business isn’t viable if employees can negotiate on equal footing.

And I mean, I understand why your perspective as an entrepreneur is that you should be allowed to negotiate at an advantage — it benefits you! My perspective is that if that’s the line between being profitable and not, it’s just not a viable business. Like you said, most businesses fail, and this one couldn’t make enough money to cover its costs.

You haven’t really answered why, you just keep saying you don’t agree. How do you create a startup and avoid hiring union workers that will drag your business to the ground?

You don't. If your startup can't survive a unionized workforce, you didn't build a viable business. Not all business ideas are viable and that's okay!

But what isn’t a viable business today can be built into one in the future. Example, every restaurant ever opened still operating today. How do you reconcile this?

How do I reconcile what? The chance that a business runs out of money before it has a chance to become profitable? That's inherent to being a business; it's like the entire reason that they fail. Sorry, try again next time — build a better business or find investors who will wait it out with you. What is the contradiction here?

It is not _necessary_ to get large investments and people who dedicate every walking minute of their lives to build a succesful company. There are plenty of businesses built on the back of solid work done under healthy life-work balance conditions.

That's the kind of startup I'd join: "I have a reasonable plan, and it doesn't involve bullshit appeals to grinding, absurdist rowing metaphors, or rely on setting cash on fire for growth"

"Sign me up."

People are going to be mad at you but rather than getting mad the correct thing to do is to just not work for a startup. Working at a startup means dealing with a boss (and a business) living on the razor's edge. Maybe that's exciting to you and you want to work really hard to see it succeed -- in which case, go for it!

However, if it's just a job to you, you're actually better off working somewhere else. Also, be aware that most startups are either unable or unwilling to share a piece of the "upside" with you, beyond their ability to simply give you a job, so there's really no point in working for them unless you specifically prefer that work environment OR you can't get hired anywhere else.

I will also say if you're a very talented engineer your talents are likely going to be wasted at a startup. The founder(s) will be too inexperienced and/or under-resourced to utilize your skills beyond building an MVP or whatever. If you're fine with that, again, go for it. But if you're looking for deep technical challenges you're going to need to join a more mature organization.

> Right before COVID-19 stay at home order in Chicago

>Sometimes companies can/will just say no or worse find some reason to let the person go.

This just seems like a story of good/bad timing, not a story of the theater owner taking a hit just to make the performers suffer. A "never let a tragedy go to waste" story if you will. Plenty of theaters, and other businesses (a lot of entertainment), shut down for long periods during the pandemic.

The federal, state, and even city governments paid millions to business owners. So it was an easy decision in 2020

Could the same owner shut down for a full year without thinking twice, just to avoid giving people a few more bucks an hour in 2023? I doubt it

Our theaters were also closed during Covid because of distancing concerns and fear.

That's why the time to make demands and organize was when this current tech boom was just getting started, when engineer salaries started to really pick up and before bootcamps and massive new waves of CS grads where in swing.

By organizing across the field, software engineers would have been able to have more input into the rate of engineer growth (which would have hurt bootcamps but generally lead to higher quality engineers, and avoided over hiring), compensation (which likely would have hurt some of the people making insane FAANG salaries, but lifted up most others), professional licensing (i.e. maybe you just do that leetcode/project/etc gauntlet once to get licensed, not for every new application), enforced professional ethics (as a profession we agree to limits on the kinds of exploitative work we do) etc, etc.

The problem is that anyone even suggesting this back then (and there were a few people) would be downvoted into oblivion. Engineers found rewarding, high paying, prestigious work easily and virtually everyone thought that was an eternal truth.

Now it's way, way too late.

I’m on my third or fourth cycle of this in tech. The expansion we just saw will not be the last, nor will this contraction be the last.

Exactly. Two quarters from now it'll be a different story.

> or worse find some reason to let the person go

Making the demand is a reason. Whenever you ask your boss for a raise, it comes with the implication that if you don't get it, you'll leave. Even if you don't, they know you're not happy, so there's an argument to making the decision for you.

>as the individual its so hard to get any meaningful change

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,

There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;

Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one

But the union makes us strong.

Solidarity Forever -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCnEAH5wCzo

> but as the individual

or in your case (and many other cases), even a collective group of individuals still had little to no bargaining power

This is why I think Executives are terrified of remote work. If the local theater doesn't want to meet my demand I have a global theater and someone will be always willing to leverage their competitive advantage to secure talent that would typically not be in their talent pool. People are no longer trapped by their geography or situation and Executives are terrified of losing that control.

Which is weird because they now have more control than ever in reality.

Previously, if you headed up a tech firm in Wyoming, for example, your talent pool was the set of all the residents in Wyoming. You'd struggle to retain your top-end talent and you probably had to overpay to get them to stick around. Even worse, you probably had to donate to the University of Wyoming (read: bribe) to get them to train their students the way you needed them trained.

With remote work, you just scribble out a post on Indeed, wait a week, and then pick the most desperate candidate that has the qualifications you need. If they threaten to leave, you offer a token raise knowing that you could always find someone else if you need.

That firm in Wyoming already had the ability to hire remotely 5 and 10 years ago. All they had to do was decide to do it.

I guess there's more remote work talent and more remote work culture around now though

Everyone learned (the hard way) how to be productive while working remotely

They previously had to make their whole « internal processes » (for lack of a better term) remote-friendly, which wasn’t probably the case back then. When you build a physical-first team, your documentation, your newcomer-induction trainings, your typical way of sharing and bonding, those will all be relying on physical presence. That makes onboarding of full-remote colleagues terribly challenging, « doomed to fail » I’d even say. Being remote-friendly is an important effort that requires you to actually become remote-first. And this effort is only considered, started and approved by executives now that the global context has totally changed because of COVID. At least in the tech industry, there’s no coming back, and people at the top of the company, even if fighting on some details, are totally getting that.

So yes, my analysis is that, because of those fundamental « remote-friendly » changes, companies embracing the new normal can compete in a larger pool, which offers opportunities as well as challenges. Companies - in the IT domain - fighting this trend will only make their life terrible and eventually abide by the new rules (hey Apple! :))

Your point (first sentence) is totally valid - thanks for sharing it! -, but you then make it polarizing by getting emotional (« bribe », « desperate »), hence the down-voting, I guess.

Another way to interpret this story is that the performers were whining and thought they had a bad deal, but when faced with consequences they realised it actually wasn’t a bad deal for them. Words and words. Actions are actions.

Yeah, you can't just make demands of other people, especially if you're relying on the other person to help you (e.g., hire you).

Biting the hand etc. You have to be the one who's bringing the goods to the table, or be prepared to have your bluff (or lack of sense) called.

Out of curiosity, what's to stop the performers from leaving & starting their own theater with those policies?

Probably: a lot of capital.

If they had the money and the interest I'm sure they could have. It's just really hard to start and run a theater. I'm guessing a lot of performers want to perform but dont want to run a business.

Interestingly enough... When i.o opened its current location they had TJ and Dave (a very popular improv act with a huge following - you may know TJ from Sonic commercials and Dave from Veep or Boba Fett or a bunch of other tv shows or movies) a big section of the theater and called it The Mission theater.

Their show was the draw but they had many interesting acts fill out their line up. After ~2 years they gave the ownership back to i.o and went back to doing just their show. They wanted to perform. They didnt want to run a theater.

I just don’t buy it. To be clear this is claiming that the CEOs are sitting behind a desk stroking a cat, thinking “now I will crush the labor movement and make all my workers feel less secure”.

This is just not a problem that Pichai is facing.

Occam’s Razor points to the very simple, non-conspiratorial answer that it really is just stock-price driven (ie market-driven) thinking (one could say “lack of actual strategic thinking”). “The job of Alphabet is to provide solid growth in share price Q on Q for investors, with minimal fluctuations to spook them”, seems a more likely thing for CEOs to be saying, after hearing this from their CFOs.

The idea that Google would struggle as hard as it did to meet its aggressive hiring goals over the last few years, then axe strong engineers just to make others scared, really stretches my credulity.

And I don't buy the coincidental timing of the fed trying to push us into a recession, which they were not being successful at, following shortly with public companies like Google suddenly finding a bunch of inessential staff to cut.

It's not like Google is taking out loans for payroll, or that it was obvious that this move was necessary. These inessential employees have been inessential for years.

The standard argument is that tech companies hired-up for 2021 lasting forever, but people spent less time shopping online in 2022. The poster child for this is Peloton. On top of the shift in demand, higher interest rates hit other companies that would otherwise advertise on Google.

Did Google need to do layoffs? No. Did it over-hire for revenue that never materialized? Yes.

>It's not like Google is taking out loans for payroll

They might not be actively taking out loans, but that doesn't mean they're immune to interest rates. Higher interest rates means that a dollar in 10 or 20 years is suddenly worth less than a dollar today. That means investors suddenly care more about how many profits can be generated today, rather than whatever moonshot projects that google is working on.

Same. It sells papers right now to paint CEOs as these omniscient villains who's only goal is the crush their workers, but I just don't buy it. There are plenty of CEOs like Satya Nadella who seem like pretty decent people. I'm sure some companies see this as a way to drive down worker leverage, but I think a lot are just reacting to the market change and realizing they have more employees than they need in areas that they don't feel will be profitable in the future.

I also think there's a bit of follow the leader going on, where, now that layoffs have started, no one wants to be left at a disadvantage. If you do layoffs that you may not actually need, at least you're staying on par with your competition. If you don't do layoffs and the market gets worse, you risk falling behind.

Ironically the 4700 people at the NYT aren't the happiest bunch right now either. The bigger the company the weirder relationships with employees, 'associates' and consultants gets. In large orgs noisy, brown nosing people often do very well regardless of talent. In our era this seems to be a card to play against the firing squad selection algos. People who forcefully push for inclusion of trendy ideas and movements (DEI, Climate anxiety etc) into the core of the firm can be perceived as not in the best interests of the giant money making machine, which like a shark has to keep swimming forward to survive... and bean counter pseudo innovators like Satya Nadella quietly wield the mallet..

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/07/business/media/new-york-t...

"Not a problem [they are] facing"

Not sure why you think that given that labor is their biggest expense. They have been known to collude

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/silicon-valleys-...

> I just don’t buy it. To be clear this is claiming that the CEOs are sitting behind a desk stroking a cat, thinking “now I will crush the labor movement and make all my workers feel less secure”.

This would be a more credible claim if big tech companies, specifically, hadn't been caught doing basically exactly this, in the not-so-distant past.

You realize more than a decade ago a cartel of tech companies (two of which being Google and Apple) literally had no poach agreements in order to suppress salaries right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

But GP is incredulous about that, because a no-poach agreement would imply that they're sitting behind a desk and stroking a cat. That's an absurd thing to picture, so by the GP's logic, those no-poach agreements didn't exist. QED.

Conclusive evidence of a conspiracy does, indeed, strongly evidence a conspiracy.

Alas, this hasn't much to do with the "no evidence of a conspiracy" case.

All no evidence evidences is no evidence. A point which seems widely misunderstood.

I agree, which is why "no evidence" would have been a stronger argument. The presence of evidence of a conspiracy doesn't suggest that CEOs are, in fact, petting cats from their desks.

Even so, there is some evidence, though certainly not conclusive.

I'll clarify by saying I'm aware of the no-poach collusion, and I'm not claiming it didn't happen. I used the absurd image to highlight and undermine the conspiratorial tone of the OP.

I don't think the no-poach case was, as the OP claims, about "cultivating an insecure workforce". It simply started with Jobs getting pissed off at Google (legally!) poaching his people, and other companies he emailed getting on board with a general "don't piss off Steve" policy that grew. While it's conspiratorial in that a bunch of execs were coordinating, I don't think it represents cultivation of insecurity or any explicitly anti-union intent.

>I used the absurd image to highlight and undermine the conspiratorial tone of the OP.

The absurd image doesn't undermine their assertion, because you just made it up. The logic in your rebuttal was nonsensical: "This conspiracy theory evokes an image of a villain petting a cat, and that is an absurd image, therefore the conspiracy theory is absurd."

I think you’re applying a “conspiratorial” vibe that isn’t necessary - employers are naturally incentivized to keep employees insecure and underpaid (relative to what they’d be paid if they organized, at least). It sounds like you’re knowledgeable on these topics, so I’d be surprised if you disagreed with any of these assertions:

1. Big tech would be willing to burn billions of dollars to crush any chance of tech unions forming.

2. Big tech is known to collude (even to conspire! ) to keep tech wages depressed.

3. Big tech’s biggest cost, by a huge margin, is labor; any reductions there could easily dwarf other shareholder-appeasing cost cutting measures.

4. Tech worker salaries have skyrocketed since they lost their collusion lawsuit, and the general sense among big tech workers was (in most cases) “they need me more than I need them, I could find another amazing job no problem by just responding to one of the many recruiters badgering me on LinkedIn”.

Speaking just for google, 6 months ago all the internal forums were obsessed with the idea that SWEs were underpaid, that google should give raises to match inflation, and that google no longer paid top of market. Today I’m pretty sure 100% of the top posts on the biggest internal forum are about layoffs - how random they seemed, how anxious people are to see if they’re going to be cut, and how vastly their perception of the company has changed. If this writer’s take is close, it seems like it kinda worked.

Employers are incentivised to retain the employment of their staff, which given the existence of other companies, means they're strongly incentivised NOT to have their employees "insecure".

That's only true if there's no cost to the employee of changing jobs. And that's not true. Changing jobs is expensive and costly to the employee, especially in terms of time and stress.

If an employee is insecure in their position as a “senior Big Tech dev” (read: top 1-2% income earner), they’ll be less likely to look for other jobs, slack off knowing they could get another job, or fight for raises / process improvements / anything, really.

I guess the real point I’m making is that the “industry-wide” nature of these layoffs are an essential component.

It's not me that's applying the conspiratorial vibe, it's the OP, and that's what I'm complaining about:

> “Controlling labor costs via periodic layoffs is like breathing for Silicon Valley: cyclical, necessary for life"... The layoffs, Harris says, have “very little to do with long- or even medium-term strategy except as it pertains to cultivating an insecure workforce.”

This article is explicitly claiming that the layoffs are not about stock price, they are about an intentional cultivation of insecurity in the workforce and an attempt to crush unions.

I'm aware of the no-poach collusion case, but I'm a bit unclear on exactly how much that impacted wages; do you have any go-to sources supporting your claim 4. that this case had a big impact? A quick search gives https://angel.co/blog/software-engineer-salary for example that doesn't show any appreciable impact in 2011 when the class-action suit was filed. (There is a massive jump in 2020 when everyone started hiring like crazy in the Covid bull market.)

I'm not claiming this factor has zero weight in the causal model, but the OP is saying something like "this is mono-causal; it's not stock prices, it's an anti-union/anti-labor conspiracy". If pressed to guesstimate I'd say the anti-union factors can't be more than 10% of the explanation, and I'd be surprised if it's even that high.

I agree that it isn’t mono-casual (cool word!), but I’m still convinced worker sentiment (which I’d classify union membership as a derivative issue of) is the main reason. I have lots of thoughts about where this fits into their priorities in general, but most of my proof is already discussed above, so I’ll focus on this instead:

These companies are not anywhere close to laying off enough people to get back to pre-COVID headcount, and if these layoffs were intended to boost the stock price, they don’t seem to have had much of an impact. Google (sorry I think about this one more than the others, for obvious reasons) is up 11% MoM compared to 5% for the S&P 100, which is good, but… idk seems hard to say that’s worth the trade off. Especially considering the huge swings the stock has taken over the past few years and months

Re: impacting wages I can try to come back to this once I’m done making ads for the day. My general narrative is “the lawsuit settled, then meta started offering progressively larger packages for experienced devs, which drove up other companies offers for the same devs” but I do not have source on hand.

I don't think the parent was disagreeing with the fact that tech companies want to oppress workers, he's disagreeing that this specific instance wasn't motivated by oppression because there's a more straightforward financial incentive (ie. cutting spending on employees in light of macroeconomic conditions changing). An analogy from the flip side: I think it's reasonable to think that most consumers want to drive a hard bargain when it comes to megacorps or even businesses in general. However, if some engineer sees the tech layoffs and starts canceling some of the SaaS subscription he doesn't need, it doesn't seem accurate to paint that as "Tech workers are using SaaS cancellations to crush corporate power".

> employers are naturally incentivized to keep employees insecure and underpaid

Aren't the management also employees? They may have different incentives from those of the large shareholders too. Case in point, so many managers chase scopes by hiring as much as possible but firing as little as they can. I remember Googlers used to joke that "VPs will protect us" when it comes to downsizing teams.

What frustrates me most is that a lot of people recognize that there are issues in the labor market but the conspiratorial belief makes things way harder to solve because we don't even know what the problem is. I see this happening in a lot of areas in both economics and politics. It does seem that people like this story of omniscient evil people better than incompetent selfish people. Like we've seen how inefficient bureaucrats are and it is well known, but while holding this belief people also hold a belief that they are led by super geniuses that have what is really impressive levels of collaboration. The two just can't true at the same time.

So I'll give an addendum to Occam's. Godelski's Razor? Never attribute to conspiracy what can be easily attributed to emergence.

It's because people are trained to think in terms of individual actors instead of systems. They're also trained to think their country's system is great if not for the X, Y, Z people ruining it. Of course, those who are educated and those with power often have to face the reality that we must focus on systems and processes.

It's not "conspiratorial" to assume corporations are invested in extracting the highest labour power at the lowest cost. It's what they are designed to do in the system we have.

> It's not "conspiratorial" to assume corporations are invested in extracting the highest labour power at the lowest cost.

This isn't what any of us (at least me) are calling conspiratorial. The conspiratorial nature involves the... conspiring part. That organizations are in fact not doing what I quotes but instead working together in back rooms to help maintain the elite statuses. While this happens to some extent, it is not this Bilderberg group type things. If individual elite companies and billionaires independently lobby for their personal self interests then others of that same group often benefit from the same things. This should be unsurprising. But it doesn't require collusion, it just requires statistics.

It is not Dems and Reps plotting in back rooms to make Americans fight and hand over power to billionaires. You're watching too many movies. The easier explanation is that they all come from the same types of families and have gone to the same types of schools. They don't need to conspire because they already have the same reference frame of the world. They're not omniscient, they just have the same biases in their priors. But that's not conspiracy, that's emergence.

A perfect example of the conspiracy we are talking about is the top comment. I am willing to bet that theater was closed (primarily) due to the pandemic rather than because they wanted to squash these performers' demands. But as the old saying goes: never let a tragedy go to waste. The judgement of intentions are being made based on the outcome, and in many of these cases could not have been predicted apriori. So either the owner got "lucky" or they were omniscient. If the latter, why the fuck are they running an theater? The same can be said about a lot of common beliefs.

The outcomes might be similar or look the same as if these mega smart people planned all this, but that's a bias seeing the "successes" and ignoring the failures (a quite common human trait). The difference between these two views may not matter in terms of outcomes, but it sure does matter in terms of preventing the same things from happening in the future. Frankly this is the key failure point of many suggestions for how to resolve these issues and why we have decades or centuries of attempts that result in failures. Because we aren't looking at the complex causal chain of events (which we can't even know beyond a certain level of accuracy and is constantly changing).

The tone of your comment reads as if you're disagreeing with my comment but you're in fact agreeing? I'm a bit confused. :)

A slight disagreement FWIW, > Frankly this is the key failure point of many suggestions for how to resolve these issues and why we have decades or centuries of attempts that result in failures. Because we aren't looking at the complex causal chain of events (which we can't even know beyond a certain level of accuracy and is constantly changing).

I believe that is true in the West more than anything. It's hated on HackerNews (an obviously neoliberal culture) but there is a reason any good economics program teaches Marxist thought.

What I'm disagreeing with is the way you use the word "conspiratorial" because it is not aligned with the usage in the previous conversation (i.e. multiple people were using it with one meaning and you used it with a different meaning).

This is the LA Times, what do you expect? This is the same paper that called a conservative black gubernatorial candidate in California "the black face of white supremacy".

> it really is just stock-price driven

The two are not mutually exclusive. The infamous TCI letter even draws a line between out-of-control employee compensation and stock price. Rightly or wrongly (and in my personal opinion wrongly) the common view in finance is that employee power is bad for business.

> answer that it really is just stock-price driven (ie market-driven) thinking (one could say “lack of actual strategic thinking”). “The job of Alphabet is to provide solid growth in share price Q on Q for investors, with minimal fluctuations to spook them”

Fair enough, but my view is that you've just described the largest problem with the modern world.

You don't even need to be mustache twirly to price fix.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-mak...

How many companies these days use some third party service for setting salaries? How many use the same SAAS service?

If we are all using the same table of values, set by a third party, isn't that collusion with an extra step to launder the collusion.

> The idea that Google would struggle as hard as it did to meet its aggressive hiring goals over the last few years, then axe strong engineers just to make others scared, really stretches my credulity.

A bit of a morbid counter-example: does one worry about "strong T-cells" when undergoing chemo, or strong muscle fibers during a limb amputation? The assumption that the C-Suite inherently cares about individual engineers during layoffs seems like a slight case of main character syndrome. If your department is being excised, others departments are downsizing, and the company as a whole is not hiring for your role, nothing can save you. Layoffs are not perfectly planned and executed with surgical precision[1], they are messy and approximate.

1. I realize the irony of using "surgical precision" after my earlier counter-example of the imprecision of amputations.

There also might be other forces pushing for those on the background. There are several articles claiming that activist investors pushed for the layoffs: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hedge-fund-billionaire-goo...

Dynamics like this wouldn't be unheared of. I hear that part of the reason airlines don't frequently computer on price is that investors don't like it because they typically invest in multiple airlines and don't want their investments to compete for slices of a pie by shrinking the pie.

Is it even collusion if I just do what my investors are asking me to?

They don't think about "crushing..." they think, "how can I improve my bonus?" Result is the same.

They were already caught conspiring to keep wages down, found guilty and paid huge sums.

We've ALREADY PROVED the conspiracy.

So big tech has 220,000 layoffs and there is not the merest hint of a blip in the unemployment rate.

This is not a tragedy - these people are going to find jobs, good jobs. In fact it's quite likely that they will go into roles which might do something other than online advertising. You know, something useful.

I very much want you to be correct, but having been around for a good amount of time, it's not always as straightforward as you suggest. In many instances, companies are reluctant to hire people who have been laid off, because they imagine that if company A laid the person off, obviously something's wrong with the person. In some cases, someone can take a couple of years or so to finally find a job, and that's enough time to create financial devastation.

(I am not talking about myself, full disclosure, but I know people.)

You do not have to divulge the basis of your departure from a company. "Creative differences".

Many people would assume you got laid off if your creative differences happened to coincide with the layoffs.

hiring managers are not that dumb ... if you prior job is amazon, and you are applying for a new job 2 months after 18K have been laid off - they can put 2 and 2 together pretty easily. Even if you did leave on your own accord, they will likely assume you were let go.

It's almost always easier to get a new job, when you still have one.

Maybe. They also might see the opportunity to get some inside skinny on Amazon, and anything they pay you will be cheap compared to the value of the intel.

I've seen good people get laid off. So I certainly don't fault people for being laid off.

Plus, being an ex-FAANG is a huge bonus when applying for jobs at "normal" places or starts ups.

>Plus, being an ex-FAANG is a huge bonus when applying for jobs at "normal" places or starts ups.

YMMV on this one, depending on what you consider "normal" companies (non-tech, non-coastal, non-advertising).

Plenty of those hiring managers have their own opinions about FAANG employees

Any hiring manager who thinks that getting laid off in 2023 is some kind of black mark against you is dumb.

Some people are being laid off for performance. Most are being laid off because they were unlucky.

Well, they actually ARE that dumb (because they don't care), and it's none of their business. I had a 13 year track record building a series of apps with a user base of over 500K as a solo dev before I was laid off because of corporate mismanagement of funding. I interviewed with 9 companies, received offers from 4 before I stopped looking, and was still in the race for the remaining 5.

Hiring managers don't have time to be super sleuths. If your interview and reference process can't weed people out, then you shouldn't be in charge of hiring people. Either way, the person who gets laid off from Amazon is going to have already shown the capacity to jump through a dozen stupid hoops by sheer process of being offered a job to work there.

I agree with this as a hiring manager who has reviewed hundreds of resumes in the past. I'm not going to say that I wouldn't hire someone who had been laid off (good people get laid off too due to bad luck), it's a data point that could make me not want to hire them in light of other signs.

But if you're a big executive, "wanted to spend more time with my family" is a popular one.

"Need to explore other opportunities" is a little weaker but still works.

"This chapter in my life is over" is also popular.

I think I should make a bingo card out of these.

As a hiring manager, I wouldn't even ask a question around departing an old company, whether they were laid-off or not. I'd have questions that were more along the line: "what will you miss from your old company, work day, etc." "what do you imagine your new role/work day would look like." "What won't you miss", etc...

Definitely not the case if you're a FAANG developer.

The issue is that a lot of these people may have to take pay cuts and make less than what they were previously earning.

Especially if you were L4+ at Google or something. Not many companies that'll pay $350k+ for a software engineer. Those that will are not currently hiring.

So FAANG developers traded long term stability for stock based comp and now that deal turned sour?

From a super lame C# dev at a boring company in a flyover state that's never gotten stock comp-- I used to fear a collapse in big tech that would cause an influx of skilled devs flooding into boring companies and displacing mere mortals like myself. Now that it's actually happening I'm very amused at how unemployable the SV cohort is to normal companies. To them you're all annoying overpaid assholes that whine about tools and process instead of just doing work. They've got 10 years of experience with ephemeral front-end frameworks, while the companies still hiring deploy Java and build UIs with XML.

No worries, even after these layoffs, there sure as hell isn't anyone willing to take a job in Minnesota.

Eh, this is just anecdotal, but as a manager whose hired people laid-off in the past, IME they're almost always better quality than the usual candidates that come across your desk. So when I see these layoffs I'm like a shark who smells blood. (ok, bad analogy, but I hope you understand I mean no harm).

The most common reason for getting laid off is having the misfortune of working in a department or on a project that no longer aligns with the company's "vision" and that's no fault of the engineer.

While some people might be biased to think the laid-off are poor performing employees, these people are simply buying into the "just-world fallacy" -- why would a bad thing happen to a good worker? But the truth is, while a company might ensure a few "rockstars" survive a layoff, there's plenty of "A" and "A-" talent that gets cut without a thought.

Yup, spot on and pretty much explains everyone I know who’s been laid off.

We’re all lucky to land that great FAANG job, and just as unlucky to get laid off from it. This year should be a reminder to all of us to never take a day for granted.

Every situation is unique, but I haven't seen this myself and I personally haven't had any problems finding a job after being laid off, twice in the last 20 years.

Context is important. If 20 out of 120k people get laid off then I might be suspicious of those 20. But if its 20k out of 120k then it's almost certain that whole departments and teams were cut, so it's hard to say anything about the individuals.

Doesn’t that ignore 1) the layoffs keep coming and we don’t know what the final amount will be? And 2) much more difficult to find jobs when companies are also on hiring freezes?

Big tech layoffs should work differently than most industries and may not impact unemployment as much. Big tech employees a lot of H1B visas holders. If they cannot quickly find a new job, they will have to leave the country.

I get the practical element of this stinks, but technically that’s what H1Bs are about. The original sponsor said we have to bring this person into the country since nobody else here can do this incredibly important highly in demand thing. If people aren’t tripping over themselves to snatch up someone that came into the market with those skills then the attitude of the government is maybe it’s no longer rare or in high demand and thus we can’t justify having that person here anymore. Yeah it’s rather cold and transactional, but that’s the model for H1Bs.

On an individual level, I really feel bad for anyone put in that positions. I can't imagine how stressful that would be for anyone going through that. I wouldn't want anyone to go through that.

Taking the emotion out of it and looking at a macro level though, I think the program has been abused by big tech to bring in workers who have less bargaining power and I'm all for it getting a bit of a reset. The purpose of the program is to bring in in-demand, high skill workers that employers cannot find in the US. If these employees cannot find other jobs quickly, it makes me question how in-demand their skills actually were.

I gather this question is being asked in government too: big tech has been arguing for years that the visas are needed because they need more skilled people than the domestic labour supply can supply. And now suddenly they don't, and hundreds of thousands of people are being laid off.

A policy change to allow people holding these visas who get laid off -- not fired for cause, not quit -- extended time to find new employment seems like a no brainer to me. An H1B holder can't have caused the layoffs themselves, so there's not much opening for "cheating". Sadly I think it conflicts with the true nature of the program, which you alluded to, to wit, lowering their bargaining power.

Eh, they always have the option of going back to their home countries and use their savings in a vastly stronger currency to tide by. Not to mention that most local markets are very happy to absorb ex-FAANG employees at inflated salaries.

5-8 years of FAANG wages is enough for someone to move back to, say, India, and retire.

For sure moving back home with the savings of a FAANG salary isn't the end of the world, but it still has to be terrible to uproot your entire life and move across the world in such a short period of time.

It's very possible moving back home means pulling kids out of school, leaving friends, and your partner having to quit their job. None of that is fun or easy.

They should also be the first to get laid off, all other things being equal. The H1 program is supposed to fill the gap. Extend their time to find another job if you must, but citizens should remain employed first.

Yes, temporary workers who are no longer needed must leave the country. Because their positions are temporary. It’s in the name.

FWIW, most of the people laid off by big tech are technically employees until the expiration of their severance.

For example, Meta employees laid off in November are still technically Meta employees, as far as immigration is considered, and will remain so until 2023/02, at which point they will be formally terminated, and the H1B clock starts ticking (60 days).

That translates to 4-5 months to find your next H1B-sponsoring gig. It's an added layer of existential stress, but the lived experience isn't "I need to find a new job quickly or I will be deported" for H1B employees with common big-tech severance packages. While I don't want to diminish the psychological toll, it's helpful to understand that these severance packages have cushioned the intrinsic risk of working on an H1B visa significantly.

I'm hoping these highly compensated former employees go on to build their own companies that create more jobs. That would be a net gain for everyone.

Unemployment doesn’t show laid off employees who aren’t yet collecting unemployment benefits. These tech workers got at least 60 days of severance thanks to the warn act.

Like most modern legislation, the warn act is way too long and thus filled with loopholes.

Lawyers have already come up with many ways to avoid it and companies are putting them to good use.

As of Dec 2022, the US unemployment rate was 3.5% based on a count of 5.7MM unemployed people. Which means those 220,000 would still only raise the unemployment rate to 3.6%

And that's assuming all those 220,000 were laid off in the US which they were not.

> Unemployment doesn’t show laid off employees who aren’t yet collecting unemployment benefits.

That is not true. The fact that they are receiving severance does not change their classification as unemployed.

The unemployment rate, which is calculated using a standard approach across the country, is completely unrelated to unemployment benefits, which are handled at the state level with a high degree of variation.

In fact, workers are counted as unemployed even if the layoffs are temporary and they are expected to be recalled (e.g. furlough).

They're often kept on as employees to satisfy the WARN act. This isn't actually severance, and they're not actually unemployed at that point.

> They're often kept on as employees to satisfy the WARN act. This isn't actually severance, and they're not actually unemployed at that point.

No, BLS does consider them as unemployed.

Contrary to commonly held opinion, the unemployment rate isn't based on who's collecting unemployment.

It's based on people who for the following three criteria. They: 1) don't have a job, 2) have looked for a job within the previous four weeks, and 3) are available to work at the present time.

> It's based on people who for the following three criteria. They: 1) don't have a job, 2) have looked for a job within the previous four weeks, and 3) are available to work at the present time.

You're correct.

To add to that, in some cases (such as layoffs), even the second criteria can be relaxed. For example, if a person is laid off but expected to be recalled, they don't need to have job-seeking activity to be considered unemployed for statistical purposes. That's just one example.

It also doesn't show people who are no longer eligible for unemployment benefits whether or not they got a job.

It's a really misleading stat.

> Unemployment doesn’t show laid off employees who aren’t yet collecting unemployment benefits. These tech workers got at least 60 days of severance thanks to the warn act.

I could be wrong but somebody who makes like... on average $150k-$200k/yr (average tech worker, low from what I've read here on comments, most "high level" people have total comp closer to $300k-$500k/yr but I'll ignore any stock grants and just focus on salary) is making like $12.5k/mo-$16.6k/mo gross

> The weekly benefit rate is capped at a maximum amount based on the state minimum wage. For 2022, the maximum weekly benefit rate is $804. For 2023, the maximum weekly benefit rate is $830.

> Your weekly benefit amount will be about 50 percent of your average weekly wage up to a state maximum of $857.

Just some random quick Googles since it varies by state.

On the low end these laid off people made $2,880/week gross.

The absolute max the state will provide is 30% of their gross pay, aka a 70% pay reduction.

I wonder how many will even bother to file/go through the headache/process. Sounds like that effort would be better spent burning leet code practice to find an actual job.

But I say that as somebody who isn't desperate/has ample savings. I'm sure I would say something different otherwise.

How is online advertising not useful? It's directly greasing the gears of the economy, matching up potential customers with businesses in a reasonably intelligent way. Yeah, sure, it's not saving the world from climate change or something, but it's clearly facilitating economic activity, and also helps keep a number of very useful products free. Seems pretty useful to our society to me.

Don’t you think a catalog would do a better job of matching up consumers to products?

Given our environmental situation, is it really ethical to “convince” people that they need some new thing that they previously didn’t know about or want?

Re: keeping stuff free, that’s still pretty convincing and it’s mostly what keeps me going as I work on the great google ad machine. It seems like a massive social good for sites to be free to users of an economic class worldwide, both large tools and tiny blogs. Any alternative I can think of (e.g. government buys everyone google drive subscriptions, sites run off donations, micropayments) have some pretty obvious issues

"ethical" is very hard to prove or disprove. For example, is it ethical for me to pay 400USD for a camera, since there is a 350 alternative that I didn't even know existed?

A complete and fair catalog is very hard (if not impossible ) to implement. But even if you did, that would NOT be enough. You might not know you "need" a good mattress unless an ad would sell it to you. Btw, if you think a global catalog would solve all these issues why not build it yourself? It can't be that hard... There are probably only a few billion products on earth, with a few variants each. Why not just do it?

Speaking of "ethical", there are many concept in the modern world that can be seen as "un-ethical", but at the same time they make the world run much better than the medieval (or communist) world they replace: interest, inflation, income taxes to name a few.

It's not like we DON'T have a catalog though. Amazon exists. The problem is that there is such a deluge of products that it becomes difficult to choose. That's where advertising can help.

As for the environmental situation, it is unfortunate. But I do believe that the only realistic way out of the climate crisis without a collapse-level drop in standard of living (read: starvation) is technological innovation, a process that seems to be aided a lot by a healthy economy (which results in stable livelihoods, etc). So I'd say if anything there's a moral imperative to keep the economy as healthy and productive as possible.

As an immigrant tech worker on visa (L1 to be specific) I find this comment cruel and tone deaf.

Losing my job means losing my status, which means having to leave the country in short notice, my wife losing her job as well, and uprooting my family (again). Sure, I would survive, but I would definitely call it a personal tragedy.

were you under the impression your job was guaranteed for life?

What a rude thing to say to someone who just lost their livelihood and ties to the place they live.

Do you ask grieving orphans if they expected their parents would live forever?

Please don’t post stuff like this.

part of the point, too, is that now that there's the pressure of unemployment instead of the moving as opportunistic jump many may be willing to accept a commensurate (possibly lower) salary/tc than they had previously instead of demanding an increase

I know somebody that was in the first round of these layoffs about 6 months ago. This person still has not found another job. It's pretty hard to find a job when everyone has a hiring freeze.

I suspect some of the 40-somethings that are turning a bit gray will have a very hard time finding a new job that paid as well as their FAANG job did. I always feel hackernews greatly overstates how easy it is for folks even working at a "top firm" to finding a new job in this current job market.

Guess tech workers should have unionized when they had the chance. As if capital was going to let the most powerful group of workers that's ever existed continue to slip their noose

If this thread had been made a year ago, even six months ago, it would’ve truly been a grasshopper and the ants situation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34199176

Doubt that will happen, we still go to this VC's website for content aggregation. Most are caught in hustle culter and want to be, and others are doing it for independance and power and won't want a union.

Ultimately I don't think our type of nerds will get together on this style of politics

Important to keep in mind this forum’s audience is a minority in everything except said forum’s viewership.

If you’re taking anything from it besides ideas, entertainment, and a dopamine hit, you’re doing it wrong.

Personally I subscribe to the 'you are what you eat' view of social media, we are social creatures, and we will always adjust ourselves to fit what we feel is THE group. Any media then makes subconscious biases whether we like it or not. I don't think YCombinator is doing brainwashing us or some crazy conspiracy, more we will conform to this audience's thinking which ultimately is about start-ups and tech company's and unions don't fit that narrative.

> Important to keep in mind this forum’s audience is a minority in everything except said forum’s viewership.

True but acting like Hacker news articles over years isn't one of the best social media based predictor of tech trends is a little silly

>I don't think YCombinator is doing brainwashing us or some crazy conspiracy

Try posting any kind of substantial critique of a YC company and see what happens to the submission.

This site is rather open and shameless about it's manipulation. YC companies get to post job ads that are instantly boosted to the front page and nobody can comment on. They have an official "second chance" queue to force boost posts that didn't receive the "correct" amount of organic attention.

If an individual is posting too many independent ideas they get re-educated by Dang or shadowbanned

Very interesting I didn't know. But still I don't think they are intentionally flagging things that encourage unionization. However, I do think if it is related to their companies the will now that you say that lol

> Try posting any kind of substantial critique of a YC company and see what happens to the submission.

I would assume it would do poorly, and then the submitter would realize the site isn't for them and then leave. Reinforcing the fact that the people who stay already had a certain bias.

In the last decade or so, there were several times I brought this up on HN (anonymously), and each time my opinion was attacked as not making any sense.

Times change.

I'm not sure that they have changed. People brought it up before and people are bringing it up now and they'll continue bringing it up.

I think the tech workers are generally still opposed to the idea

No the thing that has changed is the attacks. The upvotes I'm getting on that post indicates support. Maybe two or three years ago I'd have negative karma.

It doesn’t make sense to unionize when you are powerful and you can use “merit” to raise your power and compensation.

As the economy downturns, more and more software devs on the low end will be pushed to the point where unionization makes sense. They were never really powerful or well paid, but had hope of rising to a higher class. It’s that aspiration that lead to people discounting the ida of unionization.

It makes sense to unionize when you're powerful because that's when you actually have the leverage to put things in place in preparation for the inevitable downturn. Waiting until you need the union is too late.

Grasshopper and the ants!

Part of unionization is standardization of skillsets. Any journeyman plumber should be able to replace any other journeyman plumber, there's an apprentice program and years of training associated with becoming a journeyman. How's that going to work in IT we have massively diverse skill sets and I don't see anyway we could standardize because technology is moving too fast. We might be able to have a general apprentice program where you qualify for certain programming languages/jobs and can get qualified for other languages/jobs by taking additional training, similar to how a pilot gets qualified for different air craft. That said I don't know how everyone if going to feel about getting paid the same wage as the person next to them, tech is a pretty independent group with huge egos. I do think certain ops jobs could be unionized, helpdesk, networking and the like those are defined skills that can be taught repeatedly.

The reaction I got from previous pithy comments on unionization in past years vs. the reaction I got today from a pithy comment about unionization is absolutely night and day. The volume and pace of upvotes was eye popping and the comments have actually been discussing the merits of unionization and the realities of big tech as a labor force instead of incoherent screeching about the benevolence of FAANG

It’s frustrating because the logic never changed, only the environment has. Some people called it years ago:

LarryDarrell on July 8, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Employee activism in tech stops short of organizin...

My worry is that without premature organization, the next recession is going to make the "tech worker shortage" a permanent thing of the past. We'll never have as much negotiating power as we do now.

If say there was a Tech Workers Union/Guild/Association, we might have been able to protect the older workers at IBM, or the outsourced workers at Disney. Maybe there could be a push back against open offices and poorly implemented Agile. As it is, we're just better compensated workers floating from job to better job.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20384298

I do think that a tech union should probably be structured more like a guild than a typical union.

Imagine how terrible it would be to be on a team with subpar engineers with some kind of tenure / union protection so they cannot be fired.

I think this is a big reason tech workers are opposed to the idea.

I mean which do you prefer. Being on a team with terrible engineers, or getting layed off. Take your pick.

It's not really a binary choice either. With unions it just increases the probability of you being on a team of terrible engineers while lowering the probability of you getting layed off.

So the real question is which probability metric is more important to you and other engineers?

One of this scenarios would leave me without job, another one would push me to quit my job. Outcome is the same, but bad team is likely to cause a lot of frustration first.

No, one scenario is slightly better because it gives you the choice to quit. In the other scenario there is no choice.

Times constantly change you won't always be in a situation where you have the finances to just quit just because you're frustrated with a job.

As a high paid SWE we often forget that A job is more then doing something you "like" to do, it is a means of survival. When times change, when hard times come or when some life changing event happens, being allowed to survive is a good thing.

Union people get fired all the time.

What firms can't usually do to them is fire them without actually demonstrating cause.

On the other hand, I’ve seen great teams who were continuously stymied and stonewalled by incompetent leadership who failed to address the concerns of engineering, who refused to be transparent, who made boneheaded decisions without a check in power.

Tech, particularly Silicon Valley tech startups, have always had rather lofty ideals and conjured visions of employee empowerment, which management then fail to deliver upon. One could imagine a tech union or guild that goes beyond the function of old-style industrial unions but actually serves as a means of protection for a company’s workforce to challenge management decisions if a majority disagree, in terms of strategy. Every engineer has felt like Dilbert working under a pointy-headed boss at some point.

Why do you need a formal Union for that? Europe is full of voluntary workers guilds that provide employee input to leadership. I'm very open to this model in the US. It is less adversarial and does not require employees to be locked into Union rules. As I mentioned above, every employee in the US already has job protections if they strike individually or as a group for improved worker conditions. I think this middle path provides all the upside and none of the downside

I don't think a formal union is necessarily required. However, American business culture has such an antagonistic relationship between management and labor that it is likely such guilds' input would be automatically discarded by many companies' management. Compound that in tech the spirit of worker solidarity or even collaboration is often dismissed, you don't even see engineering "guilds" forming at tech companies.

I think a true middle path would be German-style co-determination, where there is active engagement and cooperation between workers and management as equals, moderated by the government.

https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/business/co-determinatio...

https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/eurwork/indust...

Imagine how terrible it would be to be on a team with a guy who thinks that employers treat all people with due process always.

1. People in unions are fired all the time with cause. 2. Terrible engineers exist with tenure/some other reason that they are not fired. Tech is not unionized right now and there are plenty of horror stories...

I don't have to imagine that I work in it every day, I think it's pretty standard to have a few A students a bunch of C students and a few F students. The problem with the union is the F students don't get fired and if they do they just move them to another open slot assuming they have seniority. On the plus side you're not going to get replaced at 45 by some low-end college grad because they'll work for half the price, is job security worth carrying a little extra load?

Less than we might like to think: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...

Short term is still good for engineers:

- The economics of supply and demand will swing back to software engineers in the short term, because there aren't enough of us to power every tech company's product roadmap on their desired timeline.

- Laid off workers will start new companies that will threaten the companies that laid them off.

- The macro environment will swing back eventually to favor fast growth.

Long term is bad [1], though:

- Tech is going global. Europe, Latin America, India, the rest of Asia, and emerging economies all over the world are raising venture capital and hiring substantially cheaper local talent. These companies will put downwards economic pressures on US companies' unlimited growth stories, worldwide monopoly statuses, and thus their ability to pay lavish salaries.

- Also, a broader global talent pool will put downward pressures on salaries.

- Much more hypothetical, but the emergence of AI tools could put additional pressure on engineers. It's unclear how much or to what extent, but it could be a big impact.

[1] Tech going worldwide is fantastic for workers in growing economies. They'll quickly move up the socioeconomic ladder, and that's a good thing. As long as AI doesn't eat their lunch first.

This has been happening for decades. The only maybe novel side of the story is that post COVID, there may be a hope that remote workers are paid at least respectable wages vs their head office peers living in extraordinarily expensive cities.

That hurts the developed cities and countries more than the individuals though. Expect a lot of heat out of civic conferences the next few years as they start to re-assess their budgets/roles.

Some equalization is only fair in the end. Your output / cost should be the same as any other. Not all developing economies have talent that can fit these companies today, but there's no reason that can't change tomorrow.

The major gap from my perspective is fair and equitable ways of gauging performance (tech specifically but in general).

The broader global talent pool could kick in the Jevons paradox [1]. Software eats everything and even more talent could be needed to maintain a lead. When more value is derived from software in the value chain, the market leaders can then hand out even more resources as salaries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I've been making pithy comments about tech bro unionization on the orange site for years now and I know exactly what you're talking about. Anything that even smelled like worker solidarity was shot down with vacuous logic about how the 10x engineers in big tech can't possibly be asked to associate with a lowly web master in a fly-over state.

Then suddenly today I said something and instantly got 100 upvotes...

Vacuous: "having or showing a lack of thought or intelligence; mindless."

It's a mixed bag... when your near the ceiling for a given area, it's harder to think about scaling back. These past few months in tech have been really reminding me of the .com bust in 2000-2002, where a lot of the big tech companies scaled back, others fell over (mostly coastal areas) and about a year later it hit secondary cities (Phoenix, SLC, Houston, etc)... I was pretty much unable to find anything for about 6-8 months, and others for a year.

In the end, wound up staying in a room at a friend's house that was being renovated... working small project work at barely enough to feed myself on... By the end, my truck was reposessed and I was driving a junker. All I can say is for now, keep your head down, and hit your goals.

The up side is during the down time I managed to enhance my skills, learn a new programming language (offline, with the command line compiler is so much fun /sarc).

It's cyclical... I would expect many jobs at the higher end to shift down about 30-50% in terms of base compensation. Working C2H right now, and really hoping I'm able to come in perm. Fortunately in a market not going away.

>It's a mixed bag... when your near the ceiling for a given area, it's harder to think about scaling back.

A union doesn't necessarily have to negotiate maximum ceiling salaries. It doesn't have to negotiate salaries at all. It can just be an entity to prevent the company from letting you go just because the numbers look 2% better.

I think the best of both worlds is when the union only negotiates a minimum salary.

I've thought for a while that a more formal guild would be a good approach for software developers... My fear is that it would become a certification/credential machine.

SAG has absolutely no trouble raising the standards of the entire industry without any "ceilings" for the highest paid members, nor has it become a credentialism machine like state bar associations or the AMA.

It's hackernews. Everyone here thinks they're the next Drew Houston or Brian Chesky.

They're more likely to empathize with the CEO who's complaining how hard it is to fire people in Europe than with the average even 10x tech worker.

It’s the tech heavy version of the Financial Times comment section constantly taking the sides of business leaders no matter what.

Many people on HN think of themselves as "top talent" (a barf phrase if there ever was one) and convinced themselves that they would be the ones held back by a union.

As a developer without any formal education (I dropped out of high school) my worry is that unions will be used to enforce credentialism.

I wouldn't worry about that. There are literally too many people with your background for this too matter.

I think there will be a form of credential-ism and it will continue to be similar to the tech interview.

Outright credentialism—of the right sort—would be so very much better than the FAANG tech interview, provided anyone could attempt to gain the credential through e.g. a one-off test maybe with refreshers every 5 or 10 years, without some required formal educational background. So, so much better.

It'd take a union to force FAANG into that, though, because it'd make job mobility much easier, so tend to increase wages.

How has this shaken out w/ unions in other industries? Do they push this sort of credentialism?

It's as varied as the work-- Lawyers and Doctors have professional organizations that enforce very strict credentialism, Screen actors have a loose org that enforces a firm "floor" for work conditions without hindering the ability for top talent to negotiate eye popping compensation packages. Pro sports players associations are another good example of low touch organizations that get results for everyone without holding back the super stars.

We can have a setup where everyone benefits, people who think they are top talent are free to capitalize on that fact if they truly are top talent, while also being protected from predatory employment practices if/when they aren't top talent. Even if we recognize the existence of 10x or 100x engineers surely we must also recognize that they are humans that will have family issues, mental health concerns or struggle with burnout / purpose / direction during a multi-decade career. No shortage of evidence that tech companies are working together to suppress engineering wages, why wouldn't engineers respond by working together to invigorate wages?

do you mean an apprentice program, because I think that would be great. I can't tell you how many "Senior" devs I've dealt with that don't know their ass from their elbow. At least with an apprentice program there is an expectation that you know certain things to become a journeyman, as things sit now you have no idea what base of knowledge someone has you're just guess from what's on the resume.

Actually HN is not bad. This is way worse on Blind.

Some fields reduce worker infighting with unions. Some reduce it with licensing. Management insists, though, that Software Engineers are too prestigious for the former, and well, the latter is just gatekeeping. Weird, that!

Doctors are licensed, Plumbers, barbers, Lawyers, what's the issue with people in IT having a standard base of knowledge? One of the big pluses of IT is we supposedly hire people for what they know and not just some bullshit piece of paper but how do we know what they know? Maybe having something like a bar exam or your PE exam, I not saying not to hire people with out a professional license but it could be used as a standard.

Yeah I’m in favor of either one or both (IMO some IT jobs are more like factory work that you’d hope to be unionized, some are more like jobs that you’d expect to be licensed; the border is fuzzy but this is the sort of thing that other fields manage to work out).

>Doctors are licensed, Plumbers, barbers, Lawyers, what's the issue with people in IT having a standard base of knowledge?

It's hard to establish hard standards in an industry that moves as quickly as tech can, but virtually anything would be an improvement over the frat house hazing ritual that technical interviews have become.

This type of thing is questionable.

It can be viewed from the other angle. If software engineers aren't licensed why do lawyers and plumbers have to be?

The pros of being licensed are obvious. The cons are less so. One thing licensing does is lower supply. It can be used to artificially lower supply so that prices and wages remain high.

Are you sure barbers are licensed?

There has always been a large (or very vocal) part of the HN userbase that’s very anti-union.

I can’t say why with certainty, but I suspect it’s the veneration of the idea of the mythical “10x zero to one founder” that single-handedly props up the sky and produces billions of dollars of value for their (equally venerable) VC “partners”.

It’s kind of a “temporarily embarrassed billionaire” phenomenon that I love to watch on here.

It's not very surprising though. Most of Silicon Valley and HN royalty is staunchly libertarian. VCs doing zero labour and getting rich off the backs of workers is a phenomena that cant easily be defended unless you buy into this ideology.

> Most of Silicon Valley and HN royalty is staunchly libertarian.

Unions are a libertarian concept. Freedom of association is the fundamental underpinning of libertarianism. Those at the other end of the spectrum stand for supply management instead.

I've been very libertarian (increasingly so over the decades) for a while and pretty pro union. My issues come from govt forced union jobs in some places, and likewise when govt interferes with planned strikes etc... as much as a railway strike would literally hurt for most of the country, as an example.

Would you say you’re a left-libertarian?

God no... I think communal leftist libertarianism is just wacky and doesn't make any sense at all. I think most of the left-libertarian movement is disenfranchised left-authoritarians who realize forcing things isn't ok, but haven't dealt with the fact that an idealistic communal utopia isn't really possible.

Aside, I tend to get along with most conservatives okay, I'm just far more in favor of more limited govt than they tend to be, and more personal liberty, which tends to collide when they want to make religious views law.

Would you say that right-to-work is also a libertarian concept? In the context of the United States, right-to-work employers are under less government scrutiny as they don’t have to interact with e.g. the NLRB.

If so, unions and the very opposite of unions are “libertarian concepts” and we’ve reached a point where we’re just talking about how words are meaningless and are entirely off-topic.

> Would you say that right-to-work is also a libertarian concept?

This isn't a common term where I'm from, so I am admittedly not intimately familiar with it, but as I understand its meaning, as defined by Wikipedia, it removes some degree of freedom of association. So, no, it is in stark contrast to libertarianism.

A lot of libertarian managers in the US would disagree with that. From a manager’s perspective the ability to fire anyone at any time is them exercising freedom of association.

“Libertarian” has a specific connotation in the US, certainly when we’re discussing employment within the US.

> From a manager’s perspective the ability to fire anyone at any time is them exercising freedom of association.

And they wouldn't be wrong in a vacuum, but what you're forgetting about is contract. In order for association to commence, a union is going to present a contract that spells out what happens in that case, assuming it is of concern to the union members, and the manager will be bound to what has been agreed upon. Libertarianism isn't anarchy.

I’m kind of confused here. Contracts are enforced by the government, right? Requiring a piece of paper that the government supports in order to obtain employment does not seem very libertarian.

I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, I don’t actually care about libertarianism because in the US it’s a label self-applied by many kooks (for example, just look up the Libertarian Party nominees for president in… any of our elections)

By US standards, in the US job market, “unions are a libertarian concept” is something that only someone unfamiliar with US labor dynamics and the local meaning of “libertarian” would say. It’s a pointless exercise of “Look how I define this word outside of meaningful context!”

Color me confused as well. In what way are contracts not libertarian? Freedom of association really doesn't stand up to have any meaning if you are unable to define what the relationship entails. Libertarian doesn't mean no government, if that is what you are suggesting; not in the USA, not anywhere.

To quote myself:

> Requiring a piece of paper that the government supports in order to obtain employment does not seem very libertarian.

Do you see no difference between a contract and a contract required by the government?

Anyway, I’m going to move on. It’s been fun talking about a definition of “libertarian” that has nothing to do with the practical discussion at hand. Kudos to your definition as it applies to the term outside of the US job market.

> Do you see no difference between a contract and a contract required by the government?

What government requirement are you talking about? There was no mention of this in previous comments and seems to have nothing to do with the discussion. As before, a union will most likely require a contract in order to enter into an association with an employer, but that's ultimately up to the parties seeking association. Strictly speaking they could associate without one, but disputes become harder to resolve later so it is not the best idea. Indeed, under libertarianism, the government will support the contracts you enter into by helping you enforce them. That is necessary for freedom of association to be a useful concept.

Not to derail, but I think you're conflating "right to work" with "at-will employment" here - you're describing at-will, where the employee/employer relationship can be severed by either party at any time for any reason.

"Right to work" is a union-busting concept: regardless of collective bargaining agreements an individual has the right to their employment, whether or not they pay dues to a union.

Just wanted to correct a common mistake I see made often in these discussions.

> "Right to work" is a union-busting concept…

Yep! “Right to work” is a way of framing union-busting rhetoric in a way that appeals to people that consider themselves to be libertarian(ish), so I’ve intentionally used that phrasing to try to highlight that both unions and union busting can fit under “libertarian” depending on a person’s intent.

Got it! Ignore my "correction" then, makes sense and definitely paints the point well.

In what way does it reduce freedom of association? In a right-to-work state, I am free to associate with employer X without a corresponding requirement to fund a union that I might not care to associate with.

That combination seems to increase (or at least leave unchanged) my freedom of association. (Others who do wish to associate with that union are still free to do so, of course.)

> I am free to associate with employer X without a corresponding requirement to fund a union that I might not care to associate with.

With freedom of association, a union and employer could reach a contractual agreement to require that all employees who enter into an association with the employer must pay into the union, regardless of membership status. Freedom of association allows an employer to reject those terms, of course, but if they do enter into that agreement then that's the terms of engagement that must be adhered to.

The government lording over saying "You can't do that", even when both parties are agreeable to the terms, removes necessary freedom. If the employer wants to associate with you without you needing to pay into a union, they can reject those terms on their own accord. If they do enter into that agreement, they have the freedom to not associate with you if you don't like the terms (as you the freedom to not associate with them).

It's a fair (if a bit unusual) interpretation to elevate the rights of association of the employer and union over the rights of association of natural persons.

There is no change in the rights granted. Each party has full freedom to associate with whom they choose and only enter into only the agreements they feel are worthwhile.

I, an individual, could equally say "I hate that sokoloff guy and I'll work with you only if you agree to never hire him." and at that point they have to decide if I'm worth hiring under those terms or not. If they want to keep you open as an option then they can say "Nope. Sorry. Best of luck in your future endeavours."

Very interesting assertion, never read that before! Do you think we need more governmental protections of unions?

I don't have opinions, but if you are implying that unions aren't working, perhaps supply management is a more appropriate solution to the problem?

> Unions are a libertarian concept.

As is union busting.

As the US learned a long time ago, and then eventually forgot, the freedom to organize without employer retribution can only exist with government coercion. And absent that freedom, any attempt to unionize will be (and in the last 30-40 years, has been) crushed by the capital-owning class.

Absolutely. Freedom of association depends entirely on government upholding the will of contract.

What you describe is most definitely not libertarianism. Probably conservatism.

> What you describe is most definitely not libertarianism.

That's just a No True Scotsman fallacy.

A libertarian would say that employees can choose their employers, and the employers can therefore dictate the term of employment.

One of those terms can be "you are not allowed to freely associate with your fellow employees", and the libertarian would say "if you don't like it, don't work there. #freedom"

The realist recognizes that the employer-employee relationship is one that contains a significant imbalance of power, and that it requires a government to step in and put their finger on the scale in order to ensure fair and equitable treatment of employees. This isn't theory, it's practical reality that we learned from the post-industrial sweatshop era where child labor was the norm and employees had no rights to speak of.

Now, go ahead, feel free to define your personal belief set as "libertarian" if you want. But if you support government regulating the employer-employee relationship, you are not, by any definition I'm aware of, a libertarian.

This just shows that people have the capability to turn their brains completely off if you shovel enough (potential) money at them.

For example, libertarians have been screaming from the rooftops about needing a flat tax for the longest time. Know what would accelerate socialist reforms in the US faster than any other?

A flat tax.

Public sentiment would turn on a dime as soon as people saw how much they were getting screwed.

Ok I’m a little slow. Your point is that progressive tax structures are good, so we should get rid of ours in hopes that the working class gets so desperate and resource-starved that the revolt and implement an even more progressive one sometime in the future?

Very possibly I misunderstood, but otherwise that sounds suspiciously like what a cartoon villain capitalist would propose - sure seems like they’d be the winners in the short term.

I didn't say we should get rid of a progressive tax structure. I said that libertarians have been arguing for a regressive flat tax structure for years, and the successful implementation of such a structure would expedite public backlash against conservative / libertarian fiscal policies which rob the poor in favor of the wealthy.

Yes, they would be short term winners until the voting public revolts. But it's not the 1980s anymore. Half the working populace doesn't have a fat pension on the other end of their working days. The people who actually have accumulated enough capital to care about the stock market are dying and are being replaced by people who can't even afford to move out of their parents homes until they're in their late 20s.

I was appalled by the recent discussions about doing away with income tax in the USA and replacing it with a heavy VAT (the most regressive type of tax). Libertarians in this country can be the worst enemy of the poor and working class sometimes.

This is a YC owned site and it is against the interests of YC and all it's incubated startups. A lot of founders come here, so yes that group is likely mostly made up of founders.

If more than 0.01% of this site's userbase were founders, I'd be shocked. This is largely a place where tech workers pretend to be in the know.

Hey now, some of us are non-tech workers that pretend to be in the know about things that tech workers are wrong about.

Some may be opposed for that reason, but I suspect there are many more reasons than that one.

Other possibilities include the belief that a union would be ineffective. Or corrupt. Or at least unproven. Or would kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Or would immediately be captured by special interests not directly related to employment at big tech.

Which isn’t to say that these concerns are valid, or couldn’t be addressed, or whatever. But they exist

None of those reasons are incompatible with what I said! In fact,

>Or would kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

is a re-statement of my observation! :)

Not really. You describe it as it as the veneration of some mythical 10x developer or founder who single handedly props up the sky.

One can believe none of that, but still believe that a union would sufficiently change the firm’s economics that it would no longer offer the kind of jobs it does today.

One could believe that the collective work of all the employees produces all that value—no need for embarrassed billionaires—and still think that a union would work against that value.

And I’m not sure how believing that a union is unproven fits into your theory that HN readers believe the value is produced by the Übermensch.

The handcuffs became a lot less golden.

What would the union solve in this specific instance?

Tech has had high pay gor a long time, mostly due to cheap money. If the cheap money goes away, how do they pay these inflated salaries?

Overall, I think unions can be good because you have clear terms defined in a contract. That provides a more fair environment when it comes to worker treatment, calibration, etc. But I don't see it helping with pay in most cases, certainly not in terms of preventing these layoffs either.

Nothing to do with cheap money, tech companies are some of the most profitable and revenue efficient companies in history.

For the love of lord please keep saying this.

Because it is true. And because I am sick and tired of this self hate of "inflated salaries". Jesus, we are working in one of the most profitable industries, whatever we build tends to be a long term force multiplier, and somehow a large portion of the sector thinks our earnings are inflated.

The earnings of a hedge fund manager who makes 1.5 million pounds a day is inflated. Not a software engineer living a decidedly middle class life.

I think folks really lose perspective. Apple has a revenue per employee of $2,375,435 and that includes the janitorial staff. [1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/217489/revenue-per-emplo...

Seems to be a paywall. What is the profit per employee, before and after employee costs?

Apple's gross profit margin is 40% and net is 23%. OpEx accounts for a surprisingly small amount, actually. Here's a nifty visualization. [1]

[1] https://i.redd.it/jg6t8xm07sn91.png

That's nice, but I just realized something. Aren't they a tech company that isn't doing layoffs?

From the stuff I'm reading, the layoffs that are happening are mostly cutting unprofitable programs, or unnecessary support staff. And in very small numbers (5% or less).

At this point, I'm not sure what we're really discussing since this started out as talking about how above average tech salaries are at these top-tier companies, both in terms of the industry and in general. My only point was that I don't think unionizing would be beneficial to increasing tech salary or to preventing there layoffs. Where they would be useful is more consistent treatment of employees and adherence to their own policies.

"The earnings of a hedge fund manager who makes 1.5 million pounds a day is inflated. Not a software engineer living a decidedly middle class life."

Haha, ok. Can you not clearly see your own subjective bias? Why doesn't that hedgefund manager deserve it? Many of the people working for tech companies are not middle class. At the very least, $500k+ salaries are above middle class. The starting salary at most top-tier companies is multiple times the median salary. I say top-tier companies, because these are the ones doing the layoff. Analysts are saying there will be, or is, a slow down in many if the types of products (data) sold by these companies.

You can continue to think that $500k+ salaries are warranted because you're a force multiplier etc, but that's the same reasoning CEOs and fund mangers use. Maybe they are. But don't be surprised when hordes of average people call you out.

Edit: Why disagree?

Hedge funds are parasites, they are an edge case in capitalism that needs to be patched.

I can’t think of anything else that takes so much, while adding nothing to society.

They provide asset management and investment opportunity.

Not all hedge funds are malicious.

We can also see issues in tech that are similar. Look at all the hate Meta gets for their business model - using addicting algorithms to gather and sell users' info. There can certainly be an argument made here about the potential societal damage they cause being a parasite.

This is a common argument I hear, it just doesn’t hold water.

We should absolutely hold Big Tech accountable for their business models and actions.

On the whole though, they have released many orders of magnitude more useful things than Hedge Funds.

Is there a Citadel Maps I can use ? Or a TwoSigma framework like React ?

At least Big Tech has ad-powered useful services.

Hedge funds gobble up PhD holders and the cream of the crop and use them to make 0.1% of the population 5% wealthier ?

"On the whole though, they have released many orders of magnitude more useful things than Hedge Funds."

Well no shit - you're comparing an entity that creates "things" to one that doesn't!

"gobble up PhD holders and the cream of the crop and use them to make 0.1% of the population 5% wealthier"

Um, Google does this with data scientists. Maybe they do create a useful app, but make no mistake that their primary goal is to make the stock owners (mostly the top 1%) richer off the backs of their unsuspecting users.

You’ve missed the point…

An entity that puts nothing into the host system, but consumes resources from the host to fatten itself is a parasite.

In the case of hedge funds, it’s a zero-sum game. Either you or the counter party lose depending on how the bet goes. In aggregate, society gets nothing, but the cost of the net zero value is high (highly skilled people, taking resources away from other things). It’s profitable but net useless.

In the case of Google Maps, no one has to lose for me to make a journey. It’s profitable and useful.

Saying, ohh but they both operate in a capitalistic system to make money for shareholders is not relevant.

How is that money generated ?

"An entity that puts nothing into the host system, but consumes resources from the host to fatten itself is a parasite."

You seem to miss how the system works. Those companies are where they are today because of financing. Stock purchases, including demand for existing shares drives that.

"In the case of Google Maps, no one has to lose for me to make a journey."

No, you trade your data (lose privacy) for that journey.

> You seem to miss how the system works…

Yea, the way it works with hedge funds is, do whatever it takes to make a profit, underlying company be damned - see naked shorting GME.

Where is the “financing” in that?

What about all the companies that “got to where they are now” aka dissolved because shorting to oblivion would generate a profit ?

The fact you are scraping the bottom of the barrel and claiming that just buying stock = increasing demand = creating value should be a red flag.

“No, you trade your data”

How exactly does that happen in offline mode ?

Sure an individual can use maps in offline mode, but if people did that at scale, Google would use a different revenue structure. Also you miss many if the valuable features built on that data, like traffic.

"Yea, the way it works with hedge funds is, do whatever it takes to make a profit, underlying company be damned - see naked shorting GME."

Who's scraping the bottom of the barrel now? Not all hedge funds operate that way.

"aka dissolved because shorting to oblivion would generate a profit?"

Please elaborate. Shorting does not itself lead to a company dissolving.

"claiming that just buying stock = increasing demand = creating value should be a red flag."

I've claimed no such thing. Stop straw manning. Demand for shares increases stock price, which allows the company to issue shares at a higher price, generating more capital for future expansion. The company can increase demand by increasing their value, either realized or speculative.

You seem to have an emotional vendetta against hedge funds and aren't interested in a real discussion from a systems thinking perspective. Hopefully some third party has gained something from this conversation, otherwise it was a complete waste of time.

Most engineers are not making said numbers, even at big places like Google.

Besides, 1.5 million A DAY, is near a billion a year, which is an absurdly high number. Especially if said person cries about "inflated tech salaries". You can't ignore these people have exceptional talent, in one of the highest cost of living cities.

Finally, what do these people get for 300k salaries (which was the most common number used for Google, for example)? If you stop looking at the number but the life quality, and what these people have, you will notice quickly that most of it is what we would classify as middle class a couple decades ago.

Middle class is defined using a range of the Area Median Income (AMI). This measure accounts for the income based in a specific locale to determine if you are middle class or not. For San Francisco, the upper limit for middle class is around $225-250k (2x AMI) per household.

A single person earning $300k is above middle class.

If we look solely at quality of life (which you don't even define), then the results are meaningless. Even if the things they have would have been considered middle class decades ago, they are not middle class now due to population increase and density increase in that area (you can't all have SFH in the finite space). Or possible if you mean the quality of has overall decreased, then those people still have more that the people who are currently middle class. I don't think quality of life has actually gone down, but I'd be interested in numbers either way.

Not only that. I always bring up that big "no poaching" collusion among the big tech companies. By some estimates they managed to keep around eight billion dollars that would have gone to employees.

Pando had good coverage: https://web.archive.org/web/20200304045453/https://pando.com...

I used to think that we didn't need unions, until that came up.

It's been asked, how would unions have helped with that, and I don't know, but it seems like there's some room for improvement somehow.

Thank you, totally forgot about this one.

Perhaps unions are not the end all be all, however we definitely need to follow suit like architects in my opinion. Somehow having a unified say, a way to decide on what are the standards etc. will help tremendously as far as the health of our sector goes.

A lot of them are now back to their early-2020 headcounts. Did they hire just so they could fire those same workers a couple of years later and thus “bring them to heel”, or did they overextend themselves by all the easy credit, and are now reversing course?

I don't think unions bring anything to the table for Tech workers that can't be done without one.

Us workers already have Universal protections and job security while striking even if they're not in a union.

> Us workers already have Universal protections and job security while striking even if they're not in a union.

No need for sick time, huh. Mat leave, pat leave. Generally US worker protections are some of the weakest in the developed world. So yeah I mean it's possible that these can be achieved without unionization, they definitely haven't been. A lot of those protections you allude to were actually obtained because of unions.

The weekend, and not locking workers in leading to them burning to death in downtown New York are all thanks to organized labor. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

We are specifically talking about tech workers here. They generally do have extensive sick time and leave policies.

>So yeah I mean it's possible that these can be achieved without unionization, they definitely haven't been.

Maybe I'm missing something, but almost all big tech companies have these and never had a union.

>The weekend, and not locking workers in leading to them burning to death in downtown New York are all thanks to organized labor.

When was the last time US programmers were locked in an office? I have never heard of this as a big issue.

> We are specifically talking about tech workers here. They generally do have extensive sick time and leave policies.

We were talking universal protections. I said they don't exist. It's disingenuous to then pivot back to not just tech, but specifically big tech. Plenty of smaller companies have less generous policies. This isn't the case in places that have the universal protections of which you spoke. Although on second reading you may have been referring to individuals striking only.

Universal protections around striking specifically are pretty dismal, with extremely limited enforcement in the US. Also, what good is a strike without organization? You gonna get three people outside holding up a sign? Strikes only work if you get enough people doing it.

> Maybe I'm missing something, but almost all big tech companies have these and never had a union.

Correct, but workers are the beneficiaries of policies that were brought in thanks to predecessor unions and the organized labor movement. This is like saying that we don't need the EPA anymore because the Cuyahoga hasn't caught fire in a while.

> When was the last time US programmers were locked in an office? I have never heard of this as a big issue.

You can thank a union for that. Feel free to read the wikipedia article I linked you in my original reply and circle back. Specifically the 'consequences and legacy' section. The history of worker rights everywhere (and the US is no exception) was written in blood.

Recently it’s been more about U.S. programmers locked out of their offices.

Those worker protections are good, but could be better or modernized.

The part that kills me is how differently people get treated. Employees of similar skills/output/etc can be treated entirely differently. There's no transparency in ratings and performance reviews. I've seen my company violate its policies multiple times to screw people over, including myself. A real contract, with or without a union, would be a huge step.

And software engineers, even entry level, are some of the most highly paid workers on the planet.

It really depends where… in Europe we have good salaries but not crazy stuff like in the US

In some areas. Salaries are still pretty middle class here on the east coast of the US, I have to say.

It's mostly the higher paying companies doing the layoffs.

It's also about perspective. I'm below the median for a US dev, but even so, I'm above the median in general. We have to use the Area Median Income (AMI) for a specific locale. Middle class goes up to 2x the AMI. On much of the east coast, it's about $140k per household. It's very easy to exceed this if married with both spouses working and one being in tech.

I think there has been a cynical push for unions to adopt DEI policies in order to make them less palatable. This seems to have been effective.

I have been screaming this for a while but average tech worker is a "future billionaire" so... It might be the greatest lie we are made to believe.

edit: most of us have zero to no protection, our jobs are not protected also from titles perspective. the only reason the power asymmetry is palatable was due to supply/demand for engineers. take that away, what do you have left?

On a side note I feel we can take Unionization into the tech world as a start up or an App.

Imagine a blind-esque App that just allows everyone participating to vote anonymously for a union. Then AFTER a union is official then leaders and instigators could reveal themselves or maybe there were no leaders or instigators the whole thing was p2p.

I feel something as easy and convenient as blind can allow "unions in limbo" to form at basically every company. Basically the votes for a union are in, the requirements are met but nobody is really running the show. When times change and companies pull this mass layoff BS... then people can immediately elect a rep to take the reigns as a point of negotiation...?

Is an organization that constantly takes something similar to an HOA fee really required all the time? We just really need to have organized negotiations and communications with management WHEN needed. Like the immune system.. activation only during emergencies.

For example Amazon is conducting multiple rounds of layoffs. If this app existed... No process is needed for workers to form a central point of negotiation as the union is already there in limbo. Software engineers seeing the mass layoffs in the industry All immediately nominate and vote for union reps in the app. The rep has the position for 1 year (as dictated by the app), and will be paid his current salary to do union stuff. He becomes the admin for the blind-esque forum for the company and runs polls and things like that to help the software engineers do coordinated negotiation with management.

Here's the other part of it. If this app existed. Amazon would be aware. They wouldn't perform a random lay off UNLESS it was absolutely required because it would reactivate the union in limbo. So this would prevent even the first round of lay offs presuming that the layoffs have to do with what the article is implying here.

After a year there will be another election for another rep. If things have calmed and nobody really cares any more the rep will be unelected by vote or lack of participation and the union will go back into limbo. If things are still bad everyone will vote for the rep (or a new rep) to stay in place for one more year...

Every company will have the same basic templated bylaws made by the app with additional stuff amended by the union rep. The idea is only emergency activation when needed only.

Good idea? Yay or nay.

Not saying I'm going to do this, but contact me at the email in my profile if you'd be potentially interested working on something like this.

(just fyi the email in my account is not my main email and the name is not my real name and the phone number used to register it is a burner, you should do the same if contacting me, this IS a touchy subject)

There are very specific regulatory requirements for unionization as outlined by the NLRB.

from what I read (and I didn't read super extensively) my app idea fits within this structure that's outlined by the NRLB.

Then you should talk to a lawyer, or at least a union organizer. I'm sure contacting one of your local union halls could help you out.

There should be forums or something where people can contribute to discussions and create a community. How are they supposed to vote for representatives if there's no way to know who other people are?

The app itself coordinates this. It guarantees only people with company emails can join and these people can only join with a single accocunt.

Blind already does this and is quite popular among tech workers. I'm just extending the concept with Unions.

Unions are political entities with leadership and power structures. This would be akin to casting a random blind vote for president.

Yes. But does the law require this. Does the law require the union to have a leader and be operational at all times?

Apologies, I'm honestly ignorant about the exact nature of the law here. But from the informal descriptions that I read this is possible.

The main point of my idea is instantaneous organization and formation of a central point of negotiation. It's quite obvious that the majority of tech workers are currently interested in forming a union but the bureaucracy is making this hard to happen.

With this app, the union forms a day after a layoff. A poll is kicked off on the Blind-esque unionization app and immediately submitted to the proper government sectors once a consensus is reached. There is no human in the loop as a central point. All participants are just part of the community who Agree with the automated rules of the app.

That's a pretty clever idea. I'm against tech unions entirely, but I have to say that the just-in-time union is a pretty neat idea.

Really? it was generated by chatGPT. Just kidding. Thanks!

Haha if it were it wouldn't be the first time I'd have enjoyed something from there.

It's a great idea whose time has come. Watch Apple and Google not approve it in the app store. The file a lawsuit. Pitch it to the NLRB too and you might find ways around requiring email to verify employees.

Not all the world problems will be solved with an app.

Hah! Old news. You're a decade late.

I don't think this is one of those ideas where some one is twisting some other concept into an app.

I think this fits, big time.

Typically forming a union involves someone stepping up and painting a bullseye on their back. An Blind-esque APP is literally the perfect thing to eliminate this vulnerability.

Nobody saw an end to the good times in sight. I've hopped jobs about 5 times in my career and saw a 20-30% pay raise each time. What incentive existed to unionize in that environment? Unionization only makes sense if you think the good times won't last.

> I've hopped jobs about 5 times in my career and saw a 20-30% pay raise each time

> What incentive existed to unionize in that environment?

These situations are not incompatible.

> Unionization only makes sense if you think the good times won't last.

"Good times" is a soft term that translates to "when the employer's short term goals line up with your specific employee goals"...ostensibly to keep getting paid those big numbers.

Sure. I was just sharing my POV as someone who never cared about unionization and works in the industry. I associated unions with manufacturing and filmmaking. It didn't occur to me that they would be a good thing for software engineers since we seemed to be treated extremely well already. I also never trusted people who spoke about unions because I figured they may have ulterior motives, like placing themselves in a position of power by acting as a middleman between myself and the companies that pay me so that they could take a cut.

I'm not saying what I felt was true. It was just my instinct and because I was already richer than my wildest dreams (I come from a lower middle class background) so I didn't care to overthink it. An "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. I'm sure I'm not the only person who thinks this way and since unions require popular support it's a data point toward understanding why software engineering unions aren't widespread.

Even if I was in a union I would still vote to have a layoff. Most of my compensation is in stock so I want what is best for the stock price.

The remaining ones have the chance right now. Do you see tech unions starting up?

I'm all for unions, as they are perhaps a first step away from the rat race towards progressive change. But if there's going to be a sea change, here are some other dichotomies to consider:

  Individual brands <-> Right to anonymity
  40 hour workweek <-> Seasonal work
  Manual labor <-> Automation
  Rent seeking <-> Commons
  Service economy <-> Information economy
  Wealth inequality <-> Middle class
  Welfare <-> UBI
  Raising retirement age <-> Lowering retirement age
  Minimum wage <-> Living wage
  Intellectual property <-> Public domain
  Tax reduction <-> Progressive taxation
  Usury <-> Access to capital
  Monopoly <-> Consumer protections
  For-profit insurance <-> Single-payer healthcare
  Corruption <-> Transparency
  Mass incarceration <-> Equal justice under the law
  Externalities like climate change <-> Stewardship
  Big brother <-> Reproductive privacy
  War <-> Diplomacy
  Human trafficking <-> Human rights
  Liberty <-> Justice
  Department of Defense <-> Department of Peace
  Discrimination <-> Diversity

The idea is to restore a healthy work/life balance for all and rebuild the American Dream. My lived experience has been that the USA has moved in what might be candidly called a regressive direction the last 20 years, and especially since 1980 as the rights of capital have eclipsed the rights of labor. We've embraced the objective for so long out of necessity that we've neglected the subjective as a basis for quality of life.

In other words: in the face of global threats like climate change, young people can no longer assume that business-as-usual will save them. Things must change, for our very survival.

Our ancestors faced similar challenges over a century ago during the progressive era:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era

https://progressives.house.gov/the-progressive-promise

I had a manager namecheck the layoffs as a reason they don't need to move on addressing any of our team's concerns about working conditions. Same manager invoked the Nuremburg Defense the other day. Trying times.

Someone should invoke the Unionization defense.

> I had a manager namecheck the layoffs as a reason they don't need to move on addressing any of our team's concerns about working conditions.

What does "namecheck" mean in this context?

Guessing it means they named the companies out loud, presumably to scare employees

Thanks, the original comment makes sense when I use that definition.

> addressing any of our team's concerns about working conditions

What are some of your team's concerns about working conditions? Are you guys being treated badly?

I bet this won’t get answered.

* Non-competitive pay

* No sick leave & limited vacation

* Inconsistent and insufficient planning paired with unrealistic expecations

Would be interesting to see if there is a strong relationship between the companies doing layoffs and the companies who did WFH en masse and might be thinking a layoff will “encourage” their compliance to come back to the office.

One company did exactlly that: everybody must be in the office in 3 weeks, 25% quit, no layoffs needed.

In countries with strong labor laws, that rapid dramatic unilateral change in working location itself would count as similar to a sudden firing without cause for workers who don't want to accept the change in work location, either for all such workers or for those who can't easily begin or resume a commute to the office on such short notice.

I wish the US had stronger labor laws. :(

You can make a constructive dismissal claim if permanent WFH was agreed upon. But doubt that was the case here.

The US has extremely strong labor laws in favor of the employer.

My personal favorite one is where under at-will employment, either party can end the relationship at any time, which generally translates to:

At any time:

the company is free to simply make do with one fewer person

and

the employee is free to simply make do without affordable health/dental/vision insurance, a pay check, a retirement account, and other such niceties.

Great deal. Very balanced and fair.

Then the sector wouldn't be as dynamic. weak labor laws means rapid response to changing conditions. The onus should be on workers to stay fresh, out of debt, and ready to hustle.

That’s constructive dismissal

Which company?

but did that help the stock prices? Layoffs boost stock prices, which I think is one of the main reasons why tech giants did that instead of just accelerating un-regretted attrition.

I think the WARN act (here in the US) is site based. They don't need employees to be encouraged. If they want to tell people: "Get to a site or don't have a job", they can do that already. (I think, I am not a lawyer.)

I’ve never worked for Big Tech, I’ve never even worked in one of the big tech hubs (Bay Area, anywhere in California, Seattle, Austin, NY, etc.), but I do have a hefty 6 figure salary because of the tech workers in those areas. My worry is my company will start to look at laying us off so they can replace us with laid off tech workers at a much lower rate.

To add a counterpoint - I've heard senior executives remark about the likelihood that many of those let go are the not the employees that you really _want_ to pickup. The reasoning they've implied there is that these big companies that hire so voraciously have simply made some mistakes along the way and used the current happenings to jettison those mistakenly-hired employees swiftly and efficiently.

Note: I'm sure many very talented people were caught up in this tide, too. I'm just relaying some anecdotal opinions that I've heard from hiring managers and execs in my personal and professional circles.

It also makes logical sense. Why would you let go of a 10X engineer? You'd have to be an idiot.

> You'd have to be an idiot.

Yep. Like someone who could do it through an algorithm. Like how Google did...

This is the first I hear of this, do you have a source for that?

It was in one of the articles posted in HN. In the Open Source one I believe.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34558576

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/27/google_open_source/

>Why would let you of a 10X engineer?

Because you axed a 400 person division and at least a few of those folks were the mythical 10X-ers.

>You'd have to be an idiot.

Maybe. There are plenty of idiots in upper management with the power to decide who stays and who goes. But back to the hypothetical 400 person division, the executive will see a spreadsheet with $$$ expenditure and -$$$ revenue and make the cut with little concern for individual abilities.

This was decades ago, but my uncle has a PhD in chemistry and worked for a very large and famous chemical company. They had a round of layoffs and fired his entire division. Well, he had a bunch of patents in his name that the company suddenly didn't have access to. Someone realized their mistake and asked him to come back. He already had multiple offers from competitors so they had to pay him a huge increase in salary and a bonus to come back. Mostly he didn't want to move his family, so he was willing to stay. Bottom line, there are and always have been idiots at every company.

Were they from before working at that company? Pretty unusual for patents to not be assigned to the company they were working for though? If I leave Microsoft, my patents stay assigned to them while still authored by me/others.

It goes in either direction... I think with Twitter, as an example, they ballooned and became more than an engineering culture... I think the layoffs were to really scale back to what is/was needed. Not necessarily a reflection on those let go, other than there were way more than needed for what the application is. I do hope they're able to be more agile moving forward, which seems to be the case so far.

For other things, I think some of it is short sightedness and may or may not be good/bad. For many of these layoffs, it's probably office politics as much as anything else.

I don't think you need to worry too much - those laid off workers are coming off hot SF salaries. Most of them won't really be at a "lower rate." A 5-year Googler laid off from $300k+ TC isn't going to just up and move to a low-COL area and displace someone for $100k-$150k.

I gather there are a lot of smaller companies in the tech hubs that are happy to pay $200k+ for a former FAANG'er, and moving is hard - most people won't want to move, so they'll probably stick around in the tech hubs. And now that remote-for-everyone has transitioned into remote-for-some-hybrid-for-most, I don't think the tech workforce is as location-fluid as some might expect.

Basically I think most people who aren't FAANG'ers, living outside the hubs and making "ok" money, are probably safe from getting displaced by the layoffs. A huge amount of the layoffs aren't even really coders, lots of recruiters/HR/support staff and so on are part of this, since they were making boatloads too but for arguably more replaceable work.

I do know one person who left NYC financial market job (as a developer, high pressure very high pay/bonus) for Phoenix area after 9/11 ... so I wouldn't say it's impossible... It might even be an opportunity, if you aren't trying to sell/buy a house right now.

As for getting displaced... I would worry about that... in 2000-2001 a lot of companies in SF/SV folded and many more shrunk workforces rapidly in tech... it hit here by the end of 2001, and was near the end of 2002 before I was working regularly again (for 30% less)...

Intentional or not, worker power has been crushed by these layoffs.

Really? It's like not even 10% of the swe workforce. If this crushes you, you had no power to begin with. It's more like a reminder of that fact. It's all BS though, stocks are back to 2019 levels, one of the highest periods ever, in a field where there's still not enough bodies for all the jobs. I'm pretty sure that leverage hasn't changed.

Fundamentally however, the success of this role will not last. It's just a matter of time, I just don't think this is that time.

Edit: From what numbers I could find layoffs in tech, in 2022 and 2023 so far slightly above 5% of the US SWE workforce, not even worldwide, and since not all of these people laid off were developers It's probably even less.

This was two things, a way to shed cheap heads paid for when money was free, now that it's not so free and those heads are not so cheap and a way to induce fear to keep heads in line, but like, that second part is bullshit.

It doesn't need to be a large chunk. It generates headlines like "XXk laid-off in big name tech company that is has plenty of cash" That creates the idea of job-insecurity in others.

No offense, but if that's all it takes to cow someone, again, they never had real power, so nothing to crush.

My point is, this shouldn't be all it takes to make people insecure about their position.

The power was never there. What was there was the prospect of being able to head to greener shores. It's not just about layoffs (which are still ongoing, so your numbers are preliminary and not the final tally), but also hiring freezes. For someone who loses their job now, not only are they competing with everyone else from all of these companies let go, there's far fewer positions open than there were before. So the prospect that existed in lieu of power is now gone.

I know for a fact Google for instance is actively filling roles and they just laid people off. This is theatre with unfortunate consequences for the little guy. Same with the other acronym cos.

Under usual circumstances a laid off tech worker might be able to line up multiple offers elsewhere. But with companies contracting everywhere, suddenly there's the scary prospect that it might not be so easy to land a new position, and just knowing there's uncertainty ahead could make someone feel a lot more powerless, especially if they haven't been entirely diligent in upgrading their skills.

Which worker power? I'd still rather be an ex-FAANG employee with 5 years of coasting money in the bank than practically anyone else.

does this imply the lay-offs were a product of collusion at the executive level across the entire sector? If anyone could find evidence of that it would be extremely news-worthy.

If I might adorn my hat of tin-foil for a second; at a big corp I used to work at, I heard execs predicting this outcome back in early 2022 in combination with being incredibly relaxed about the employment market being extremely hot at the time.

It would be difficult to prove active collusion, its more like institutionalized collusion, and I doubt that's a crime.

e.g. the same consulting firms are hired by all companies, and they will give the same advice when dealing with falling revenues, plunging stock prices etc.

> It would be difficult to prove active collusion

Unless an IT admin stumbles across some interesting emails...

A story I heard long ago when I was a contractor at Sun about the default settings for bounced email in sendmail (this was likely the early 90s when it happened - I heard it in '97).

At one time, messages that bounced were sent to postmaster - possibly in hopes back then (when things were smaller) that the postmaster would know who it should have been sent to and pass the email on.

One of the night shift sysadmins who was responsible for postmaster at Sun got an email that was misaddressed between a few manager+ level people for what would be considered constructed dismissal of a number of people.

The following day, the people mentioned in that email found a printout on their chairs.

... and a change request when in to only include the headers(?) of the email message to postmaster rather than the body.

Nobody needs to collude or conspire when interests align.

that's not necessarily true, as timing still can matter.

Interests and incentives align perfectly: make more money at the top (stock goes up after a layoff if the company isn't going bankrupt), crush employee's power and morale, afraid employees either work harder or quit.

The price for that is just some more attrition and losing a bit of culture, both things that aren't priced in for their bonuses/stocks and so the C-level couldn't care less.

Also, it doesn't make a lick of sense. Growing head count 50% over 2 years and then pulling back 5-10% isn't breaking the back of workers. It sucks for the 5-10% but big tech still has much more demand for workers than they have except for like 6 months of their existence.

Its going to be interesting to see how this plays out.

Right now, they've taken away or trimmed many benefits and increased expectations around performance. Will a change in hiring make them change the benefits structure, or will this be the new normal?

In particular, if there is a large backlog of workers looking for jobs after several quarters of reduced hiring, it will likely allow them to revisit compensation. It all depends on how exactly this pans out.

Also, Powell has said the Federal Reserve is trying to increase unemployment and decrease wages so it’s unlikely to be prosecuted even if there was evidence of intentional and active collusion considering corporations and the government are aligned on this.

I mean, it's not the first time that SV execs have colluded. See also infamous Eric Schmidt / Steve Jobs non-poaching agreement that leaked.

But I also don't think explicit collusion is actually necessary. Once one does it, the others can follow without fear of losing staff to the others. Meta and Twitter started the fire, the others can just toss in some logs.

So it has the effective material results as if there was a conspiracy, without the need for it.

> Once one does it, the others can follow without fear of losing staff to the others.

I agree but at the same time there was noise from the boardroom throughout the industry even BEFORE these layoffs at Meta, that this was coming.

I'm not convinced that Twitter is necessarily as relevant a data point given they were actually burning cash at the time and its understandable that a new (and possibly even reluctant) owner might want to rectify that.

doesn't imply that to me. this is not the first market down turn. this is not the first time companies have shed employees in anticipation of a market down turn. this is also not the first time to use this type of situation to unload less desirable employees. it also provides for companies with cover with the unions (especially those just formed).

no collusion necessary to be familiar with history

> to unload less desirable employees

I don't think that has necessarily happened. I've seen people write that Google's firings at least feel somewhat arbitrary.

The metric they're less desirable against might not be an obvious one?

It may look like collusion, but in fact tech leadership (VCs/Founders/execs/CEOs) makes wildebeast look like lone wolves. I've seen very little evidence of independent thinking with that crowd, which is funny because a lot of them will identify as some flavour of libertarian or heterodox.

Basically, don't attribute to malice etc...

Didn’t Nash (mathematician) prove that collusion is possible without explicit coordination (a form of game theory perhaps)?

Why collude in private when you can copy in public? It's not as if all the layoffs happened on exactly the same day.

Never forget when all the FAANG execs were colluding about employee pay and non-poaching agreements...

They denied it and it was later proven out.

Prisoners dilemma. Who needs to say it when everyone knows it's in everyone's interests to play the game. I feel that a lot of these layoffs are really the result of delusional hiring euphoria vs malicious anti-employee strategies, but I wouldn't say that companies would avoid "needless" spending when they could be adjusted for a no-net-los outcome.

This claim violates Hanlon’s Razor

“Never attribute to malice, that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.”

Over-hiring, over-salarying and not anticipating the consequences of a pandemic and post-pandemic on business might qualify as “incompetence”

The thing that bothers me is this tone I'm seeing online and in particular in this discussion where people presume that a salary is owed no matter what, and that withdrawing that salary (as in a firing) is somehow always morally corrupt. I'm Gen X, so when I say "we weren't raised with the expectation that the world owed us anything", I mean it.

EDIT: A better discussion of Hanlon's over here: https://fs.blog/mental-model-hanlons-razor/

"An instance of Hanlon’s razor being proven wrong is the mafia. Prior to the 1960s, the existence of the mafia was considered to be a conspiracy theory. Only when a member contacted law enforcement, did police realize that the malice being perpetrated was carefully orchestrated." (I was not aware of this!)

But they all find themselves in the same predicament all at the same time, across diverse markets and services?

As far as I can tell there's is no actual downturn in the market, this is all anticipation.

And so it's a 'movement' even if it's not a diffuse, or actual conspiracy.

> As far as I can tell there's is no actual downturn in the market

You are dramatically incorrect. Unit sales, free spending, rates and inflation.

+ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stocks-poised-hit-lows-survey...

+ https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/apple-sales-expected-to-f...

+ https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/25/inflation-is-cooling-but-hig...

expected ... poised ... weak outlook ...

This is again the finance/investment tail waging the economic dog.

https://edition.cnn.com/business/live-news/stock-market-news...

It seems like there's a tussle between the finance 'economy' and the actual economy.

I have a recent counter razor: "Never attribute to malice or stupidity what is better explained by self-interest"

Many of these orgs laying off thousands have fallen into the depths of a moral maze -- where rational thinking is just impossible and all that's left is self-preservation.

Vanova's Razor

-sigh- I google Vanova's razor and then realized you were quoting OP. :)

It worked!

Vanova's Fallacy

Exactly, the incentives will explain the behaviour, they always do. I suspect managers being judged on their number of direct reports explains some of the over-hiring.

> Exactly, the incentives will explain the behaviour, they always do.

Who cares? "I was following incentives" is no different from "I was following orders." It doesn't become suddenly okay to do harm just because there's an incentive to do harm.

Hacker News and startup culture in general are toxic because of people blaming market conditions instead of taking responsibility for their own actions.

If it's really about incentives, would you support docking executive pay proportional to layoffs, to incentivize against future over-hiring? Or do incentives only apply when they excuse harming workers?

I think that's an excellent incentive proposal, that even the boardmembers would probably agree with (as overhiring is not only costly in feelings, but in cash)

Okay, but that's because you're well-intentioned and believe that changing incentives will actually fix the problem.

The predictable response from the top whenever cutting executive pay is proposed as an incentive, however, would actually be that they need to maintain competitive executive pay to retain talent.

The reality is that board members and executives are drawn from the same pool of oligarchs, and the "incentives solve everything" narrative is just a marketing ploy for the "close a symbolic loophole and move on to the next loophole" strategy. People who do harm just because there's an incentive to do harm can't be trusted not to do harm, because there's always another way to gain benefit by doing harm.

I'm not sure that there's a pragmatic difference between harming people out of malice and harming people out of self-interest.

If someone causes harm out of ignorance (a better word than stupidity, in my opinion), then they can be educated and they'll likely stop causing harm.

If someone causes harm out of self-interest or malice, it can be assumed that they'll continue causing that harm and there's no simple remedy. I do think that selfish or malicious people can change, but the solutions take time, and in the mean time they continue to cause harm if not removed from the situation.

If someone is motivated out of self-interest to behave in one way or another, you can likely use that same motivation to bring about a different behavior. The complexity of the remedy is dependent more on the rigidity of the system incentivizing the harmful behavior than on the individual.

If someone in your life is motivated out of malice or stupidity -- it is these situations that would seem to require time to remedy. Unlearning abusive behaviors that exceed rational self-interest takes time. Experts report education seems to take 25 years (and more and more all the time)

> If someone is motivated out of self-interest to behave in one way or another, you can likely use that same motivation to bring about a different behavior. The complexity of the remedy is dependent more on the rigidity of the system incentivizing the harmful behavior than on the individual.

Sure, you can change the behavior, but it's not solving the fundamental problem that the person can't be trusted. The next situation that arises where doing harm is incentivized, they'll do harm again. In the worst case, this just allows sociopaths to move on to the next loophole as soon as you close the previous loophole.

This isn't normal. Normal people have a moral compass and can be trusted to try not to do harm even when there are incentives to do harm.

The reason corporate culture pushes this "incentives solve everything" narrative is specifically because it allows the people at the top to move from loophole to loophole. The vast majority of people involved aren't at the extreme of the sociopathy spectrum, but there's a mix of naivete, denial, and kool-aid drinking which keeps this ideology alive.

It's telling that putting people in jail, seizing personal assets, etc., are incentives, but never get brought up when people are pushing this "incentives solve everything" narrative. Limited liability is sacrosanct, allowing the sociopaths to hide behind corporations. For example, someone at Ford made the decision to literally kill people for short-term profits with the Ford Pinto, but if that person's name was ever exposed to the public I can't find it--they certainly didn't go to jail or pay any real cost. Instead, the damages were paid by Ford shareholders and workers unrelated to the crime, and those actually responsible likely just moved on with their careers.

> If someone in your life is motivated out of malice or stupidity -- it is these situations that would seem to require time to remedy. Unlearning abusive behaviors that exceed rational self-interest takes time. Experts report education seems to take 25 years (and more and more all the time)

I have no idea what experts you're citing here, but I suspect that they're describing a formal education which prepares people for working, which is not what I'm talking about when I say "education". If a person is causing harm out of ignorance, the education needed to correct it usually comes in the form "Hey when you do this, it's causing <description of harm>, could you do <way to avoid harm> instead?"

In any case, we don't get to choose solutions based on how easy they are: we have to choose the solution based on the problem.

If someone is causing harm out of ignorance it can usually be solved with education. If someone is causing harm out of malice or because they're following incentives, it can usually solved by removing their power to cause harm.

Changing incentives for a person who's causing harm out of ignorance might cause them to re-analyze the situation and learn that they made a mistake, but it's not the most direct way to solve the problem. And changing incentives if a person is malicious or simply following incentives, doesn't solve the more fundamental problem that they can't be trusted to try not to cause harm, as described above.

Changing incentives simply isn't the right solution in either case.

When business takes a downturn and you have to choose whether you get to eat or the person you're paying gets to eat, do "morals" really come into play, here?

> I have a recent counter razor: "Never attribute to malice or stupidity what is better explained by self-interest"

My modification: "Never attribute to malice or stupidity what is better explained by rational self-interest"

The key observation being that even people at odds often act in rational self-interest given the situation they are in with its associated needs and challenges, and the information they are aware of. The only way to bridge this is via communication.

It seems like you might have a more nuanced view of what the phrase "rational self-interest" means to you than the average person, but given how people actually use that phrase most often, I think that phrase isn't an effective way for you to communicate what you're trying to communicate.

The phrase "rational self-interest" as it's most often used is just a euphemism for "acquiring as much money as possible" which is neither rational nor what most people are interested in for themselves. There are lots of people who make the choice to take less money in exchange for more time with their families, more fulfilling work, etc., and that's a rational choice. And we have ample evidence that beyond a certain point, making more money doesn't make you happier.

I despise Hanlons razor. It flies against everything we know about people in power.

Probably made popular by powerful

It was designed by a Reptillian scientist who was sponsored by the crab people from Mars.

Though it may seem like a plot against humanity, it's actually just a market ploy to cause a run on aluminum foil head pieces, engineered by Big Haberdashery.

And we all know what Big Haberdashery likes to engineer.

My favorite comment this week

No, the powerful just leave out the "adequately" part, and it becomes "Unless you have access to physical evidence that something was intentional, every mistake in our favor was inadvertent."

There's a better, less-oversimplified discussion of Hanlon's Razor over here:

https://fs.blog/mental-model-hanlons-razor/

I agree, firms thought the era of cheap money (10+ years) combined with ramped up demand caused by pandemic would last for a good while longer. They forgot about Galton's reversion to the mean...

> “Never attribute to malice, that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.”

In the cutthroat randian landscape of the US business, it is the opposite:

“Never attribute to incompetence, that which can adequately be explained by malice.”

Incompetence, neglience, oversight etc are concepts frequently employed by the corporations to escape not only public opinion backlash, but also actually escape legal consequences in a courtroom.

That's fair. Claiming "we didn't know the consequences" (while those consequences weren't completely impossible to predict and coincidentally benefited the defendant) would be one possible strategy.

You have no idea - that sentence is one of the go-to legal defenses in corporate lawsuits as anyone remotely following any corporate wrongdoing cases would know.

Walmart routinely has price mismatches between the price on the shelf and the price at checkout, to the point if it was a local store they would be shut down. But for a big company they can just say 'oops, our bad, we're just too big to do the things a store is required to do, like keep our display prices in sync with our actual prices' like the law requires. I routinely take pictures of the mismatch and submit to the FTC but nothing becomes of it. But if a local business did that they would be hit hard.

Look at Amazon now with outright fraud happening, Amazon being a market for knockoffs, and the goto fence for thieves and stickup kids. Again, if that was a local business they would be so hit and management would be risking jail time.

It seems like corporations are given this pass everywhere, yet average Americans get called as shills for just wanting basic corporate accountability.

This is exactly what they're doing. The big players have gotten together in a room somewhere and tried to figure out how to push wages down, and they decided to just all fire a bunch of people at the same time. Every industry in the country engages in systematic and widespread price fixing (eggs, insulin, rent...) and this is just an example. They want to push wages down, push prices up, and that's how they make profit.

This American Life did an episode where they did a deep dive on a famous incidence of price fixing (it was some chemical in chicken feed). https://www.thisamericanlife.org/168/the-fix-is-in

The idea that tech giants dont collude to push down wages is, frankly, fanciful. We know about non-compete agreements and such- this is industry standard practice.

The article didn’t do a very good job providing evidence to make the case for its premise that big tech is trying to keep employees afraid.

Overall I think the article itself was a poorly written screed that just threw in lots of anecdotes and assertions but didn’t really have any meat to it.

For example, what do climate change etc have to do with unionization? Unions are supposed to be vehicles for worker protections, not ESG.

Also, the simple answer is, that shareholders, particularly large influential institutional shareholders, are demanding unreasonable and unsustainable quarterly growth from tech esp as the rest of the economy is sliding into recession. The short term shortsighted way to do that is to cut ongoing costs, and employees are the biggest cost in that bucket at tech companies. No need for a conspiracy when everything is pretty transparent already.

Why the downvote?

follow up question,

why hasn't apple needed to do this? how are they keeping 'tabs' on 'worker power'?

Union-busting, NDA’s, restricting new slack channels, non-competes - all the usual ways!

This response just turns my question into:

why haven't the usual ways been sufficient for the rest of the tech companies?

why are the usual ways still sufficient for apple but not for the others???

Apple still might do a big layoff.

From what I read, Apple has never been ashamed of running on a model that clearly states "this is not a democracy, Dear Leader has all the power". Because they can attract talent on an ideological level, they just don't need to care on a day to day level. See also all the military-level secrecy, cult-like behavior, etc etc.

Other companies try to mealy-mouth their way around the facts of life, most of the time, because they have an "evil" image so wouldn't be able to recruit otherwise.

I think it's not as simple as "action x => result y". it's a messy art more than a science. Apple is trying x, y, and z. Google tried a, b, and c. Both companies have different circumstances, different employees, different shareholder mandates, etc. And of course every CEO would like to be the one who solves Industry-Wide Problem in the best way (less public backlash, more savings, whatever your metric is)

> restricting new slack channels

how is restricting the creation of chatrooms in a communication tool that's likely provided by the company in any way comparable to any of your other examples? If Slack is provided by your company, they would likely have mean to get everything you might have written there, that's already an incentive to move any discussion the company might frown on (like talk of unionizing efforts) on another platform that's not controlled by them.

Separating workers from each other is a primary focus of fighting unionization, even to the point of starting and dismissing shifts in staggered groups. Work is where workers see each other. A lot of organizing is done at bus stops near places of work, or just outside of parking lots talking through car windows.

Workers at work should have the ability to discuss their jobs with each other.

edit: I don't know if I made this clear enough, but you cant just tell people at your job to go to a website if you only see two or three of them at a time, and since your employer has invented a new policy against "handing out political literature" you can't even print business cards with the website on them and hand them to people without risking termination for cause.

it just feels like a petty move compared to actual union busting effort. And instead of a link to a website, put a QR code with an invite to a discord server on that business card, where the channel #resources links to the appropriate manifesto and leaflets...

> Workers at work should have the ability to discuss their jobs with each other.

yes. But that's not necessarily the obligation of the company to provide them a tool to do so, hence my comment about using another platform

Slack doesn't share DMs and private rooms without court order.

So why did Tim Cook take a 40% pay cut?

Which is completely absurd if you bother doing 20 seconds of math?

The reason Apple didn't do a mass layoff is because they didn't overhire during 2021/2022.

Like most articles from the LA Times, this seems like complete BS as usual.

35 million in cut pay is at 300K per worker, ~116 people. That's 0.07%, which while not 5%, certainly is not nothing.

This should give you some insight: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-28/goldman-m...

Apple hasn't done mass layoffs I don't think?

My feeling is that they were already doing it so for them there was nothing to be changed.

>why hasn't apple needed to do this?

Yet? There's still a lot of market uncertainty.

they hired way less than others over the past 2 years

Second hand information: Apple on average takes 2 years to fill an empty position. They almost never lay anyone off, just find another role for someone.

It's where the evil corporation narrative falls down, apple makes sure they hire the right people and then keep them. It's the way it should be.

But even for other tech companies, people on HN need to look outside of tech and see what life is like, there are people on here who literally had the best possible jobs in the entire history of humanity, with prepaid 3 meals a day, free daycare, free gym, free everything, yet somehow think that these companies were evil exploitative capitalists.

I'm sorry - no. These were the best employers in the world. Now there's a serious downturn in the economy, they are firing like 5-10% of staff. That's nothing. Try being a factory worker at a Tyson food factory in the midwest, or a foxconn factory in china, then you'll understood how good these tech companies treat their employees.

The fact that they coddle some of their workers (typically a very small minority), doesn't mean they are not exploitative capitalist enterprises. The two are different concepts.

I’m sorry, but this is just class war crap. Instead of pitting workers against each other like the plutocrats want, always ALWAYS remember that even with all that non-monetary compensation, the executives are still taking more 100x of the value created by the worker.

This is like complaining about some athlete getting paid millions to risk their health for entertainment, while not once giving a thought about the billionaire that pays them.

No one is buying a ticket to watch Jerry Jones sit up in a skybox. Similarly, no one buys a piece of software or a chicken breast because of some exec cruising away on inertia.

Bingo. Billionaires win when they convince thousandaires that millionaires are the real problem.

Apple did not way over-hire during the pandemic like all the other big Tech co's.

Apple wasn't stupid enough to think a black swan event was going to last forever. These layoffs shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

Maybe the answer is that no one is trying to "keep tabs on worker power" and the decision is primarily driven by financial reasons?

Cheap money had to be spent in an inflationary economy, money is more expensive now with higher rates and thus companies that ramped up spending too fast need to cut costs.

Apple did not hire as many people during the pandemic so they don't have as much pressure.

I never really understood the cheap money argument. Big tech doesn't need to take on debt to expand, so why would it matter what the interest rate is?

I also don't understand the notion of "overhiring". Tech doesn't just hire people without having anything lined up for them to do. At least not en masse.

Apple didn't hire excessively last year. During the pandemic, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon all had double-digit % employee growth. Apple did not - their growth was typical of previous years at Apple.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/apple-had-slower-headcount-g...

Apple may have had more sensible hiring policies all along. It seems to me that many of the layoffs come from companies that hired like mad over the past few years without necessarily having a need backed by the bottom-line to do so.

absurd:

> “Controlling labor costs via periodic layoffs is like breathing for Silicon Valley: cyclical, necessary for life,” Malcolm Harris

The current wave of layoff is unusual, hence being extensively discussed on sites like HN.

Layoff for this tech boom but what about before the late 2000s?

You mean the 2008 global financial crisis? Many companies died, some companies did do layoffs but that was in response to an actual financial crisis, something not happening now and unlikely to happen in 2023 or 2024. Nothing like that nitwit was describing.

Weren't periodic layoffs something that happened up to and during the dot-com bust? I'm talking about '80s-'90s Silicon Valley.

I don't remember that at all, and I was working in the Valley through that period.

There were a lot in the dotcom crash but that was aperiodic.

Or maybe it’s just a balance sheet thing

Agreed it seems a beyond far fetched here to think that the backlash from the free money pandemic spending period is collusion to shutdown worker power. To me it seems more like all the executives are seriously concerned about their revenue and costs going forward into a recession that was increasingly clear as a function of deteriorating macro economic conditions.

There seem to be a lot of easier options to justify the actions than the one in the article. I'm not against tech unionizing I unfortunately find the argument weak however tantalizing for those who might prefer conspiracy theories.

Both, I think. If everybody lays off 6% of staff in strategically low-value projects, there will be a glut of workers willing to take new lower salaries. These jobs are still in high demand, and the company can reset compensation for new hires to a new baseline.

Example of this happening here: https://twitter.com/hkarthik/status/1618007542483025923

This saves on labor costs at minimal productivity cost to the company. Great for capital.

Right, I’m not sure why people here are assuming there only has to be one reason behind a decision. An overarching strategy, if there is one, needs to look at all results of a decision.

The corporate ghouls at our company just announced a non-negotiable RTO, but notably, no layoffs.

Since company execs seem to be like a flock of sheep - one gets spooked and they all run in the same direction - I'm betting my company can't afford to do layoffs, even though they'd want to follow suit.

From what I hear in the grapevine, we've had a devil of a time trying to hire over the past couple of years.

It's way more simple, this is purely about Operating Leverage.

Essentially, over the last 2-years, many companies Expense growth outpaced their Revenue growth.

This is direct result of how Wallstreet holds companies accountable for EPS.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/operatingleverage.asp

Agree with this but its less about unions and more about resetting the empoloyer/employee dynamic after a period of time the employees clearly had an upperhand. they are tired of allowing flexible work and giving 2 yoe people 300k. they want power back.

its not about evil-y stroking a cat, or meeting in a smoke filled room. its as easy as just reading the moment in time and taking advantage.

TC at Big Tech is generally dominated by equity at the outlier end. Everywhere else it doesn’t look like pay is all that different to 5 or even 10 years ago. So either the effects haven’t shown up yet or else this was just an opportune time to stack rank and yank.

If you go on levels.fyi you’ll find that fixed cash (“base”) is the same mid-100s to mid-300s that it was the throughout the last decade for L3/new-grad and L7/L8/principle/staff respectively.

Discretionary cash (“bonus”) is the same 10k-100k, though 100k is rare and always was.

Fixed equity (“initial grant”) is about what it’s been.

People making crazy money were always doing it with discretionary equity (“long-term incentive” or LTI). That’s where you get engineers making 7 figures, and those people are not remotely worried about being laid off, or getting hired through a hiring freeze somewhere else with another great package. It would be pretty nice to be one of those people :P

Too many people got into software without being truly passionate about it because money, Big Tech absorbed a bunch of people who crammed the standardized test but weren’t really producers, and a soft macro situation is a great excuse to clear cut for tech CEOs looking at weak market caps and need to show shareholders and the street that they’re doing something.

I very much doubt that the folks left have lost much bargaining power, but time will tell.

Around these parts a lot of the affected laid off were the upper end of that equity range. Expensive long-timers or over-hires who aren't producing at the level they negotiated. I don't feel bad for them.

It's just simple economics that if you create a surplus of labor it drives the cost down. Also good for the share price.

The only question is if the cost of the churn exceeds the savings by re-hiring out of that pool of laid off workers.

Intentional or not it's palpable that there's a shift in mood as questions in various all hands type meetings shift to layoffs rather than whether or not there will be wage increases to help match inflation etc.

I think this article ignores a lot of realities of the market to reach its conclusion. Many of these companies did record hiring during the pandemic while there stock values have plummeted and while we may not yet be in a recession its pretty clear one is coming. All these factors have investors worried and the reality is that public companies need to placate investors and layoffs are one tool in that toolbox. Do these companies want to "crush worker power"? Maybe but I don't think these layoffs are due that.

I agree, I don't think this was the intention behind these lay-offs, but I think they will begin to weaponize layoffs like this at some point to curb salary increases and worker power.

https://archive.is/t1IE4

I wonder how the layoffs will affect raises, RSU refreshers, and future salaries in the big tech companies.

This is just history repeating itself, like with the 2.0 web bubble. Cheap money is dumb money. Dumb money is scaredy-cat money.

Let's not pretend that we aren't heading bal...erm I mean, head-first into a recession.

And to force a recession.

Nah.

American tech workers should get paid minimum 300k. All i know are very smart and hardworking.

Is this a bot?

Sensationalist. What is "worker power" in this context anyway? As an active software engineer I don't feel my power has been reduced in the slightest. We went through a coronavirus/low interest rate bubble, now things are normalizing.

I swear after centuries of capitalism you'd think people would understand that things go down as well as up, and just because they go down once in a while is not a harbinger of the apocalypse or a sign of any grand conspiracy. By the definition of many of these articles the only solution that doesn't "hurt labor" is if the executive suite walks out en masse, apologizes on their knees for being exploitative capitalist pigs, and turns the company into an employee-run non-profit co-cop/adopts European-style labor relations.

I fully expect to get laid off at some point in my career due to factors beyond my control. That's part of the deal, and anyone betting on an alternate state of affairs needs to get their shit together. Also buy a goddamn life insurance policy if you have dependents, contribute to your 401k, and save up a few months of expenses so you can deal with being laid off if it happens. None of these should be a problem at the pay scale of engineers at any of these companies that have done layoffs.

Ahhh, legacy mainstream media, where tech companies doing desperately needed layoffs just like practically every company in the world over an economic cycle is a nothing more than a singular conspiracy to "crush worker power." Never change my liberal echo chamber journalist friends, never change...

I hear DEI initiatives in HR departments were particularly hard hit. So it's not just capitalists breaking workers' backs, there's a strong current of white resentment as well...

Cool story bro.

These layoffs have been primarily constrained to tech and finance, not to every company in the world. Maybe for some companies these layoffs are “desperately needed”, but surely not for the most profitable ones, at this scale. At the very least it’s terrible for morale and PR.

You mean *consolidate worker power. Critical people don't get layoffs unless they work for a muskcorp.

That's a (maybe intentional?) misunderstanding of what is normally meant by worker power. We're not talking about the individual influence of workers within the organization, but about the group ability of workers to affect the working conditions.

> Critical people don't get layoffs unless they work for a muskcorp.

Citation needed.

Many of the higher profile high performers who are now unemployed would seem to be a direct counter example to this claim.

What you’re describing doesn’t seem to match the recent layoffs we’ve witnessed.

Actually it matches what I'm seeing. Are you not seeing all of the recruiters/HR being let go in these layoffs? Seems like there are many more than SRE's (SRE's are what I'd consider to be business-critical).

I don't have hard numbers though, even layoffs.fyi doesn't have a great breakdown of who was affected by these layoffs by department. If anyone has hard numbers I'd love to be proven wrong.

I’m not claiming there aren’t reductions happening in non-critical/discretionary roles, but that this does not seem to be the primary target of recent layoffs.

This is different than what we’ve seen in some years past where layoffs seemed more about trimming dead weight.

In the recent layoffs I've seen some very senior high-performing engineers get the axe, because they were very expensive and the org could get two juniors grinding out CRUD for the same value as one super senior architecture astronaut.

Things brings about another question. Will the change in economic climate encourage these companies to ditch over-complicated Rube Goldberg machine stacks in favour of ones that allow Juniors to grind out CRUD. One can but hope

I doubt it. Who is going to get a promotion with a sane architecture?

I can’t help but feel this misunderstands why systems become complex, and conflates simplicity with sanity.

Ditching an architecture also directly implies adopting a new one. If juniors are at the forefront of that, I don’t think the resulting architecture will somehow get magically simpler.

Architecture is a topic to be debated, no doubt. But if anything, I’d expect the departure of senior talent to solidify complexity, not enable some magical escape from it. The risk of changing a system goes up significantly the moment the people who understand the system walk out the door.

Critical people don't get layoffs unless they work for a muskcorp.

Google have just let Chris DiBona, Jeremy Allison, and Cat Allman go. I guess you might not consider those people critical to Google's mission, but laying them off is probably going to have an impact on Google's ability to recruit people from the open source community in the future.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/27/google_open_source/

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