Hacker News Reader

Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like we are seeing cartel behavior with tech employment. I wouldn’t know how to prove such a thing, but I think it’s pretty clear that some collusion is going on.

View on HN

This is what I find so frustrating. Every company running the same percentage of layoffs and bringing everyone back from WfH at once simply can't be a coincidence. How else can workers get their companies to negotiate with them as individual companies rather than cartel members but to unionize?

It's not a coincidence but neither does it need to be collusion.

It's just similar companies responding to the environment (market, covid, etc.) in a similar rational way.

And a bit of a herd mentality too, which is human nature. But that doesn't require collusion, it's just board members reading headlines.

"Rational" is arguable. There are a lot of analyses that would indicate that layoffs hurt your company in the medium-to-long term, even if it props up your short-term prospects.

There are plenty of companies still haven't done layoffs (Apple), or have even raised employee salary (Nintendo, Sega) to ensure that employees feel safe and continue to perform at high levels.

If anything, it's irrational behaviour. Herd mentality, prioritizing the short-term, fear-based, etc.

Just like after all the smart guys in suites read books like The World is Flat and decided most work should be immediately outsourced to India as a fool proof cost saving measure.

Coming back from pandemic emergency working arrangements can be explained by the end of that emergency.

I think this proves the opposite. Companies bid up salaries and perks to a level they can't actually sustain. Now that the stock markets are back to normal they can't afford this anymore and need to make cuts.

Exactly. This is just a symptom of belt tightening. A lot of money losing companies will have to cut benefits like remote/WFH and start laying off people.

OTOH, if a company cannot offer WFH/remote now, then I'd say that's a strong signal of a money losing company that's in trouble. Hint: a lot more than you think, they just were able to coast on easy interest rates for so long.

At any rate, the Fed will eventually inflate the trampoline below this falling economy. The economic pain will be too much to bear, especially given how vulnerable Biden is for re-election.

I don't understand why eliminating wfh would be a cost savings, isn't office real estate expensive and don't companies externalize costs into their remote employees?

Why is wfh costing the company money?

Remote shouldn't be considered a 'benefit'. It's not a gift to the employee to provide a much better work environment. Which doesn't even cost the company any money.

What are you going on about? Google laid off employees while still making a net profit per employee of about 400k, more than they're paying employees on average.

It’d be pretty easy for the tech ceos to form a signal chat with one another.

Even if that wasn’t happening, public announcements like this signal copycat behavior is fine.

Or is it just that the same things are affecting many companies in the same industry?

The market is providing clear incentives and companies are responding: cut costs, roll back overhiring, improve per-employee productivity.

UKG announced the same thing a couple days ago. The timing is certainly suspect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com