Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChiMan | Hacker News Reader

Any CEO who instituted or countenanced such ridiculous amounts of unnecessary hiring needs to be the first one fired.

You need punishment in capitalism. You need incentives, and you need punishment. Because where you have incentives with no punishment, somebody just has a free option—-in this case paid for by damaging employees’ careers and health, as well as investors’ capital.

This insanity must end. And it will only end when you start doling out punishment to the guilty parties: The CEOs. No more CEOs “taking responsibility.” They need to be fired.

View on HN

It’s all about the markets, if company A hires a lot and the market thinks it’s a sign of growth it rewards it with demand for its shares, then company B looks at A and sees a hiring wave as the only material event that could have triggered A’s shares outperforming its own and decides… fuck it let’s signal to the market that we do are growing.

Then the market psychology changes and some CEO is the first to think that maybe this time the market would reward the opposite action, aka a layoff. It works… so the next one over goes and the rest of the dominos fall in the name of competing for institutional dollars within a zero-ish sum game

Apple didn’t go on a hiring binge. It didn’t hurt them.

Apple is a hardware company. Did other hardware companies go on a hiring spree? Otherwise it is unrelated.

I think it’s more competitive than that.

Company B isn’t just looking at company A’s “success”. Company B’s levels of attrition are increasing because its employees are going to company A. So company B has no other option than to open the hiring floodgates or else they can’t meet bare bones maintance tasks let alone growth.

Not your comment but most of the comments on this thread are whacky. It’s like people completely forgot how hot the software market was during the pandemic. Anecdotal but I had 2 friends trying to break into the software game at the same time. That didn't happen during the pre 2019 boom so who knows what that means lol

From board perspective it is difficult, because it is difficult to find CEO to do the layoffs and start strategy work again. It is just easier to keep the previous CEO if he is willing to do the dirty work.

I want to see some heads on spikes!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com