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Comment by biztos | Hacker News Reader

Is anybody tracking the growth of the staffs of these companies?

When I hear “NetCo lays off 10K” I wonder, does that mean they will have fewer employees than a year ago? Or is this just a blip on an overall trend of hiring?

This graph[0] makes it look like Microsoft, for example, is laying off far fewer people than they recently hired.

I would intuitively expect Yahoo to be the exception, but it would be great to see something like “…representing N% of its yearly hiring average since 2020” in these headlines.

[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/273475/number-of-employe...

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Yahoo is at 7,000 people prior to these layoffs, working back from the percentage.

In 2019 they had 10,500: https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/verizon-media-layoffs-...!

In 2017, when Verizon acquired them, they laid off 2,100 employees. https://www.fastcompany.com/4040668/tim-armstrong-confirms-y...

The CEO at the time indicated this was a 15% cut (https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/oath-ceo-tim-armstrong-d...), so working backwards they had 14,000 people in 2017.

So in short Yahoo has shrunk to half over the last decade, despite mergers with AOL and other acquisitions

Yahoo did not have 14k people in 2017 I left yahoo shortly before the merger. The article says it was between yahoo and AOL. There were many layoffs prior to the merger probably only about ~9000 people were around in 2017.

You are correct though, they shrunk to half over the last decade but they had already shrunk by about half in 2017.

The yahoo that exists today is the Yahoo+AOL post-merger entity, so 14,000 is the right number to compare it to. It's not like all those AOL properties were canned - the business unit with the shutdown announced today came from the AOL side of the merger, as did the site linked in this topic for example.

It’s almost as though news stories are calibrated to maximize clicks, rather than to convey information.

I agree, there's a very weird media focus on layoffs right now, without broader context (number of hires, number of companies, number of unemployed, number of people in the workforce etc).

I’m sure it’s an orchestrated campaign to scare people back into the office. whip out of sight out of mind whip don’t be the first to go whip occupy your desk whip don’t be the last one in whip don’t be the first to leave…

This is probably part of the BDSM role-play among certain executives.

This chart from Chartr Daily is the best I've seen that shows firms hired like crazy and the layoffs now aren't even bringing us back to 2018/2019 levels:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CnxN-Mayo3N/

I don't know if anyone is tracking it explicitly, but in more nuanced stories, (eg. Ben Thompson's stratechery[0] - paywalled), it does come up.

Basically, most of these tech companies have been hiring at a constant rate for years, and also experiencing constant attrition. Once the economy soured, and then hiring freezes started, attrition rates had crashed, and the employee count wasn't as affected by freeze as desired. The layoffs have been roughly a reset towards the headcount before the freeze for many companies.

While the whole article is paywalled, I'll quote an excerpt from ben Thompson:

> The popular narrative right now about these layoffs is that tech companies dramatically over-hired during the pandemic, but while that seems to have happened with Amazon — and for arguably very good reasons given the way that e-commerce shot up during lockdowns in particular — the reality is that the rest of the tech companies largely increased at the same rate they always had. Sure, the number of employees they added was large, but that was a function of keeping the same hiring rate off of an ever increasing base.

> In short, no one was giving up a job at one of the big five tech companies this year as fear spread about a broad-based slowdown in hiring... These companies, though, adjusted more slowly to the slower rate of attrition, which means they accidentally increased their headcount... the relatively limited size of the layoffs to date actually reflects that: these companies are not returning to their pre-pandemic levels of employees, but rather to where they would be had they kept up roughly the same rates of hiring this year that they have over the last ten

[0] https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-r...

That suggests that companies could have designed layoffs as accelerated attrition. They could make a prediction about who likely would have left on their own. They could make a prediction (or observation) about whom they were managing out. Then the first layoff target is the staff who would likely not be here in two years anyhow. That's a different approach than for example culling people with higher salaries who are not graded as extraordinary contributors. Either way, I think having an identifiable rationale for layoff choices makes a layoff less shitty to go through.

It suggests they could have, if they were competent to do so. But for all their genius at product-market fit, I don’t think any of these companies have conquered the beast of self-serving bureaucracy.

> I think having an identifiable rationale for layoff choices makes a layoff less shitty to go through.

I don’t know. When I went through one the identifiable rationale was “move jobs to a cheaper country with weaker labor laws and more corruption,” and I think “oops sorry random” might have felt better.

> culling people with higher salaries who are not graded as extraordinary contributors.

This seems like a better way to reduce costs though.

If I got laid off “because we thought you’d quit soon anyways” and I hadn’t given notice already then I’d be quite upset.

Depends on if they keep growing or if this was a peak and more layoffs continue to happen over the coming months/years. The current big bump followed by a not-as-big-cut is mostly from overhiring during the pandemic plus the weird economy. I think a big part of it is to push down wages. Collusion without explicit collaboration.

However, it could be an initial reaction (right or wrong) to chatGPT and copilot and such. The start (or continuation) of the automation of knowledge work. Nobody has a crystal ball, so we'll see where it goes!

I'm thinking the coming two+ decades of AI transformation will make the Web/Internet transition look quaint in terms of societal impact. But I'm just a 52 year old geek that has been following technology for 40+ years ;)

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