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Comment by kypro | Hacker News Reader

So weird describing it as a bubble – did they forget the economy was shut down and companies could literally only do business online?

If you look at the rate online sales growth during the pandemic if anything it's a surprise that tech-hiring wasn't even more elevated.

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Every mass layoff article posted on HN (Microsoft, Google, Meta, etc) had people posting comments showing the staff counts sometimes doubled in size in a few years prior then reduced by 1/5th (or less) of the pre-growth number via a layoff. A bubble would typically cannibalized all the growth, not a small subset.

I can see how an overeager company who bought into their short term growth numbers as long term realities might overhire during unexpected growth when you don't really know what the upper limit is.

A short term (relative) explosion in demand growth can put businesses in a difficult spot where they can't handle the growth presently and they don't know if the 10% increase will turn into 20%. Hiring is a longer term investment you can't just turn on/off since on-boarding and training is a big investment, and humans are involved, so there's a fundamental timeline disconnect.

There's also the flood of capital from the public markets. Even before COVID tech stocks increased quite a bit.

This is pretty different than a "bubble" which is a completely fake boom that explodes 100% then falls back to zero when people realize it's bullshit. This is more like a boom that goes from +20% to +10%. Which yes still ultimately left a sizeable group in the crosshairs.

Finally someone who isn’t over eager to catastrophically moralize the situation instead of being level headed.

I was a 9 year fang veteran whose pay was grown 70% without my input over Covid. Everyone hired except me who felt this would cool. I tried to stay level headed and build a money making division. I succeeded. And was laid off for my efforts.

So I hope the people who like telling people like me we were just dumb idiots overhyping ourselves never get a taste of how things really work.

This is similar to the bullwhip effect but for the labor supply chain.

I think it is the bullwhip effect.

I don't know the specifics but think it is distinct, since there's a pool of labor that people go in and out of rather than through a sequence of steps. Bullwhip might describe connecting labor to education, though.

Still counts as a bubble. The bulk of the tech hiring done during that period wasn't just to meet the increased pandemic demand but rather based on lofty corporate projections saying that the demand was here to stay. But then a couple years later the exponential growth didn't continue, didn't slow down, didn't even stabilize – it completely reversed back to pre-pandemic levels. And then all those companies found themselves with significantly higher payroll costs than they could afford.

That’s the line that gets me.

>Higher payroll costs than they could afford.

I find it disingenuous for companies having record profits, stock buybacks etc to use such an excuse

Not every company is Google or Microsoft. You have to remember that the vast majority of the ones that had layoffs, including $100B+ "unicorns", have never made a single dollar of profit in their entire existence.

If there weren't protests, then we would still be locked down. Government loves lockdown. It is wrong to refer to it as pre-pandemic as opposed to pre-lockdown. But you probably are still wearing a mask in your car when driving by yourself.

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