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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

Mass layoffs work when there was over-hiring (management's fault) or there was a big revenue downturn (market forces). This time it was because of over-hiring at the COVID mania. People left safer jobs to join FAANGs tempted with higher salaries and a prospect of improving their CV. And now they are dumped back into the toughest tech jobs market in 20 years.

This is totally a fault of management and none of them are losing their jobs! People have a good reason to be pissed off.

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I really don't agree with this line of thinking.

> Mass layoffs work when there was over-hiring

Ok, let's define "over-hiring".

Google...

had 99k employees in 2018, 119k in 2019, 135k in 2020, 156k in 2021, 190k in 2022, 174k in 2023.

and made $136b in 2018, $161b in 2019, $182b in 2020, $257b in 2021, $282b in 2022, $297b in 2023.

They basically doubled their headcount to double their revenue. How is that over-hiring??? Each person added as much revenue as the ones before them.

Over-hiring would have been if post-Covid business would have dropped, which, guess what, did NOT happen for FAANG. It was, in the worst case scenario, stable (even then, slightly growing).

Not necessarily. If your revenue curve is trailing your hiring curve by N years, you need to stop hiring N years before your revenue curve plateaus.

Yes, you need to stop hiring, great call.

Have they stopped hiring? Uhhhh...

That really tells you all you need to know about the cynicism.

Don't forget there are also hundreds of thousands of external people. Bodies bought from different vendors, doing pretty much the same job as internals but with lower pay and almost no benefits.

They've been cut a lot last year, but no news about it.

Also there are cuts in high cost of living locations. Why to keep people in California if you can hire in Warsaw and pay x0.25 of US rate there?

Is there a source for higher cost locations being affected more than lower cost ones? I didn't get that impression.

I suspect that more of these layoffs happen in the US, both because it's the most expensive location, has the most staff and has the least friendly redundancy laws (for employers, that is)

Revenue per employee is never a goal in itself. Only revenue, expenses, and strategic goals. If they can meet their strategic goals with less resources, they over-hired.

Yet they're hiring 1600 people as we speak.

Again, this is just callous.

>"And now they are dumped back into the toughest tech jobs market in 20 years."

Is this the consensus then that is really rough out there right now? I know that big tech has been hit hard the last year but is the outlook equally bad for startups, enterprise etc. as well?

It's wage suppression.

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