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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

This is based upon the assumption that layoffs are a failure rather than a feature which, while I find it distasteful using people's livelihoods in such a way, doesn't actually seem to be the reckoning for a lot of people. When times are good why wouldn't you hire to maximize profits and then cut people loose when times are getting bad? If you can ignore the human factor it makes sense.

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It's not even clear to me that tech employees (as a whole) would be better off if such an overall system were in place for the last decade. Instead of (highly-visible) layoffs now, you'd have seen substantially less hiring across the last decade (invisibly) and probably much lower market-clearing compensation levels as a result.

You can't have the benefits of go-go-gang-busters hiring sprees without sometimes having layoffs, IMO.

Two things

1) you mostly need your money now, to pay rent or mortgage, food, activities. In that cyclic markets like this are bad for devs. In choosing between a higher salary that comes with a non negligible chance that you won't have a salary at all for a sustained period, or lesser compensation but higher stability, I choose the latter.

2) The crazy increase of salaries was the result of the raise of demand, and got matched by a raise of offer. Offer is by nature much less elastic than demand: it takes years to make a good dev, but we turned from the hottest market ever to layoffs in under 6 months. The problem is that the offer creation machine (education) is not elastic as well. You can't recycle your CS degree into a construction degree very easily. This means that while the market is slow over the next few years, we will see waves of devs freshly minted out of college, in proportions that correspond to a hot market. Assuming that the demand was generated by actual value creation, and that it restarts in a frw years, it will be a long time until we get back to job safety and prosperity

Cyclic markets are bad for some devs who have tech jobs. Cyclic markets are probably better than staid markets for those many people who would have never landed a tech job in an environment where over-hiring was a career-ending threat to CEOs.

>you mostly need your money now

I don't believe this to be true. I imagine the majority of people in tech have their money stored in assets (stocks, house, car) as opposed to cash.

Stocks as in the thing that's worth half it was 6 months ago? House as in the thing you need to live in, have a mortgage to pay for, and can't liquidate? Car as the thing you need to move and loses value over time?

You can still sell stocks now. You can switch to renting a house and renting a car so you have cash now as opposed to later.

Or, stocks as in the thing worth the same as 2 years ago, 50% more than 3 years ago, or 100% more than 4 years ago...

A consulting company I worked for was really strict on how they managed resources on the bench. As a new employee, I was surprised by how many of my co-workers had at one time or another been laid off by our company and came back. The key seemed to be that the company had always been quite open and transparent about how it manages bench resources and that they rarely carry anyone for more than a month. Everyone knew what to expect and if they were on the bench and didn't have any likely projects coming up, they knew to adjust their finances accordingly for the coming layoff.

> When times are good why wouldn't you hire to maximize profits and then cut people loose when times are getting bad?

Because you don't want to harm people.

Now That would be a firing offense for a CEO.

Most shareholders prioritize returns over headcount, otherwise they would be donating to charity instead of buying stock.

It's almost like just relying on the invisible hand of the market to create good results doesn't work.

And to be clear: just because you're incentivized to harm people, doesn't exonerate you when you harm people. "I was just following incentives" isn't a defense.

Depends on what you are optimizing for. Seems like tech employees are doing just fine. Enormous compensation, great severance, and entering a low unemployment market.

How many tears do you shed when someone with a vast amount of wealth has to take a few months to find a new job?

Do you think flooding the market with a lot of laid-off people is going to keep tech unemployment low?

Unemployment rate in Tech and software development is still incredibly low, even lower than the general rate.

What is the rate you are citing and when was it calculated amidst all of this

https://www.trueup.io/layoffs

The latest numbers I have are going into January 2023 which were 1.8% for tech.[1]. Per your link, there were 120k people laid off in 2023, and 240k laid off in 2022, so the 240k would already be baked into the numbers. Your link also shows that there are still many more openings than the layoffs, althought the difference is getting closer

The number of "tech workers" depends on the definition used, but this grouping of BLS roles gives ~5 million workers from the US.[2]

If every tech workers laid off in 2023 stays unemployed all year, that would only bump the Tech unemployment from ~1.8% to maybe 3.8%. But we know that isn't the case because there are tons of open positions.

This is all very worst case estimates because many of the people laid off don't fall into the job roles I mentioned, they just work for a tech company

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tech-employment-hol...

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3542681/how-many-jobs-...

Good to hear, hope it stays that way

> Depends on what you are optimizing for.

I'm optimizing for people's well-being.

Yes, I'm aware that people's well-being is hard to measure. That doesn't make it not worth optimizing for.

> Seems like tech employees are doing just fine. Enormous compensation, great severance, and entering a low unemployment market.

1. Contractors are losing jobs too through lack of renewal of contracts, it's just not being reported because on paper it's an absence of an event, not an event.

2. Even among full time workers, tech workers aren't the only ones getting laid off.

3. The big companies are the ones being reported, but smaller companies are following suit, and don't have as nice of severance packages.

4. It is not in evidence that we are in a low unemployment market. Those who were just laid off aren't reflected in unemployment statistics yet. In many cases you can't file for unemployment if you received severance, so many will never be reflected in unemployment statistics. And there are a bunch of ways in which unemployment and underemployment simply aren't represented by the statistics, ever.

5. If the severances were as good as you're saying, it would be cheaper for the companies to keep the workers on. Representing this as anything other than companies using workers to subsidize their lost revenues is absurd.

> How many tears do you shed when someone with a vast amount of wealth has to take a few months to find a new job?

I'm not sad when execs get fired, that's what I'm proposing. But it appears you've done some mental gymnastics to convince yourself that the workers are the ones with vast amounts of wealth.

> Because you don’t want to harm people

Yes but you see the risk to our brand is less than the expected return so harming people is in the shareholders’ interest.

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