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Comment by dangrover | Hacker News Reader

I was there 2016-2022. The hiring boom in 2020 was definitely palpable. Entire vast orgs of teams who had no context on the problem they were solving, previous efforts, etc, because they were all so new.

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I'll never understand how these companies literally doubled or tripled in size.

Nobody thought to themselves "maybe this zero-rate interest environment will end", or "maybe our business model is losing steam"?

No, instead they went full-on increasing headcount, leaving software engineers scratching their heads on exactly what they were supposed to be doing.

When discussions started about companies "poaching" talent so that others couldn't get them, I saw the writing on the wall. Possibly no role even lined up, but let's just get them onboard and we'll figure that out later.

I'm over 20 years into this career but am not FAANG. I like my boring, predictable companies for some reason, and they like me.

> Nobody thought to themselves "maybe this zero-rate interest environment will end", or "maybe our business model is losing steam"?

No one in management cares. The hiring and then firing is a feature, not a bug.

I think there may have been some government financial incentive but I wonder if there was a sense early on, in no small part due to the terrible media and government messaging FUD around Covid, that there would be significant death and debilitation that could have a meaningful impact on available talent, so they decided to get some extras and/or secure some off the market in advance.

Or that every other 100K+ employee tech company has become sluggish, moribund, and then eventually faded away.

It makes a lot of sense when you consider the incentives of all the individuals involved. Individual line managers think "I need more headcount so I can increase my scope of responsibility and get promoted," and go to their directors with "These are all the cool new projects we could be undertaking if only we had headcount." Directors think "If I don't provide career-advancement opportunities for my best managers, they'll leave for a competitor and the best engineers will follow them, and my carefully-constructed org will collapse", then go to finance with "These are all the cool new projects we could be undertaking if only we had budget." Finance people look at the negative real interest rates that were present in 2020-2022, think "Just about any project that has any chance of generating additional usage or revenue beats the 2% nominal and -6% real returns we can get from the market, so these project ideas look pretty good" and tells the CEO "Our best bet is to invest in the company itself, so we are going to greenlight all the headcount requests."

What no one wants to face is the possibility that the tech industry was increasingly becoming a jobs program for otherwise unemployable (at least, wrt the income they wanted/required to live a middle class, financially-independent lifestyle) college grads of a certain pedigree. If you think the crisis of (often justified) Millennial whining and despair is bad now, imagine an alternate reality where millions of even our brightest and most well-connected couldn't find work after college - or worse, were only able to find work that didn't pay their bills or that forced them to move home (rather than these fates being limited to the average graduate) . Offices empty, downtowns and office park-adjacent strip malls seize up, Tesla never gets off the ground (okay, yes, I know, bear with me). Essentially, you eliminate a substantial portion of the consumer market, because everyone in the prime of their non-medical-expense-driven-consumption life is broke. We managed to stave off that Armageddon for a decade, and if it meant entire branches of multi-billion-dollar corporations were spending 90% of the work day comparing Soylent bars and playing Fortnite (dependent, of course, on you're having chosen the right school, major, or parents), then so be it.

Look at what the business of these companies was. None of them needed this many non-customer-service personnel. But that many people needed jobs.

> Entire vast orgs of teams who had no context on the problem they were solving, previous efforts, etc, because they were all so new.

To be frank, that was my opinion of Facebook before you were hired.

I was there 2013-18. The company doubled in size every year, so it was normal. Was 2020 worse than that?

Also, the stock price literally never decreased between when I accepted my offer and when I finished, so clearly I was holding it all together \s.

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