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Comment by yalogin | Hacker News Reader

It looks like the tech industry is cutting or has already cut about 150k jobs at this point. Is there really that much elasticity built into the features these companies are building? 30k is a really large number of employees to cut anywhere. They really have to shut down many many projects to achieve that. If that is the case, it should impact growth and revenues quite a bit. The implications of this are huge. For example --

1. The management has so completely screwed up that they don't deserve a job.

2. Is the management approving projects that they don't believe will impact the bottom line? Did all of the companies mature at the same time and became risk averse?

3. What does it mean to immigration and cap on it?

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> 1. The management has so completely screwed up that they don't deserve a job.

Yes and no? It feels a bit silly to look at things from a results perspective instead of a process one. Management everywhere was spending money to grow as fast as possible. Reality hit (and whether or not you think this reality was predictable is up to you--but I'd like to see if any money was put where your convictions were) and now these research/growth projects need to be cut down. For many, it was the correct decision at the time given the information they had at the time.

Until laws are put into place to stop the boom/bust cycle the people being hit are always going to be the labourers.

> The management has so completely screwed up that they don't deserve a job.

These companies aren't employing fortune tellers, no one really knew what the future held when the pandemic hit. It was extremely reasonable to think that there was a chance that big tech's market size would massively increase. Even if that chance was only 10% the correct management decision is hiring as if it will happen and then laying people off in the case it doesn't, because catching up is hard, but firing people is easy.

Interest rates have increased. Thus, the full cost of a project that takes some time to complete before generating revenue has increased. Thus, some projects are no longer a profitable endeaver

Software companies have a ridiculous amount of elasticity. Look at ebay and yahoo.

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