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Comment by pwinnski | Hacker News Reader

It isn't every big company. Apple hasn't, and they're the biggest of all.

I think that is the point: it does not feel accurate to say that "macroeconomic conditions are tough" or that you expect slowdowns while recording record levels of revenue, and yet company after company after company is using these imaginary tough headwinds to justify laying off 6-8% of staff, often while paying dividends or issuing stock buy-backs.

If it really is rising interest rates, then be honest. Say "due to rising interest rates, we are going to lay off 7% of staff... while buying back stock using our record profits."

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Apple isn't the best example. For instance their Safari development team is already severely underfunded, there is barely anyone to fire.

Or maybe Apple is a great example because they've resisted over-hiring in the fat times, so don't have to trim in the lean times.

Or maybe all these layoffs wouldn't be a problem if we in the US had a government that supported people more reliably with wages and affordable health insurance for a decent duration after a layoff.

Over hiring then laying some off shouldn't be a catastrophe in tech.

I also think people would have less issue with these layoffs if CEOs didn't make it sound like a short term critical business decision while being worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

I agree with you, but all else being equal, layoffs are stressful and... while I would prefer that companies have the flexibility to do so paired with a social safety net to lessen the impact, there's also an argument for employers who don't just plug in and then discard people like "resources".

That Apple doesn't agree with you on development priorities for Safari does not mean the Safari dev team is severely underfunded.

They could be, or not. They seem to issue a preview release every two weeks or so[0], so they are clearly making progress on something.

0. https://webkit.org/blog/

That's a long-term strategy to encourage native development and keep people in the app store.

Yesterday, Gitlab hadn't had a layoff.

While Apple did have a much smaller increase in headcount over the last few years, I wouldn't use Apple as an example while we're still in the midst of everything. In December, people were touting Google as an example of one of the layoff-proof companies. I didn't trust that logic, and I don't trust the logic that Apple is somehow immune when they're so closely tied into the tech industry. For example, I'm theorizing that a non-trivial part of their profits comes from supporting the developer ecosystem (who else buys max-spec Macs at scale?). Regardless of the underlying reason, mass layoffs and tightened budgets are going to dry up B2B profit streams.

To me, complaining about the reasoning used by companies while not currently at the head of such a company feels pretty darn foolish. You just don't have the numbers at hands to qualify what they are saying.

And I don't understand why you would care about layoffs from the tech industry (of all people) anyway, it's one of the best industry today and will probably for a while still (forever?). Maybe one of those engineers can help his local tech shop instead.

Pretty bad argument when we in fact do have many of the numbers for public companies and those numbers show growing revenue and record profits...

I'm not an accounting nor a forecasting expert, but I'm comfortable theorizing that the current quarter's financials of a company doesn't necessarily dictate its next moves.

I find people's tendency to generate outrage from nothing other than headlines to be very annoying.

This would make more sense if any quarter stood completely in isolation, but some of these companies have been making sounds about "economic headwinds" since before the last quarter started, setting expectations low, and then still managed to "somehow" deliver outstanding or even record results.

Hearing how bad things are going to be for more than three months as they continue to not, in fact, be that bad, I started to wonder if they even believe what they're saying.

And if they do, that's fine, but then why use the money for buybacks/dividends rather than saving it for the downturn they're sure is coming?

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