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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

The connective thread is that tech growth has slowed/stopped and Wall Street is looking to make cuts, because salaries are expensive, and shit, if they have the option between more expenses and less expenses, they will keep taking 'less expenses', until it clearly and incontroversially affects the bottom line.

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Right but where are Atlassian's layoffs, Asana, or any of the other hundreds of "lower" tier tech companies? It's unusual that they're all skating by, to me.

The bigger companies used their cash during the pandemic to go on a hiring spree, both bloating their headcount and their overall salaries.

The smaller/lower tier companies did not have the cash to compete with this, and now do not have as much to fix.

Also the layoffs in smaller companies just aren't big news.

There's micro-scale reasons for why particular firms aren't affected by this, but that gets into the weeds of particular companies' roadmaps and balance sheets.

The macro-scale of 2010-2020 was 'growth, growth, growth', the macro-scale of 2020-2022 was 'hire, hire, hire', and the macro-scale of 2023 and 2024 is 'freezes, layoffs, cuts'.

>Today marks a very hard day in our 20-year history. We have made the difficult decision to rebalance our team to better position Atlassian for the long term, meaning we will be saying goodbye to around 500 Atlassians, or 5% of our employees.

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-team-...

Just google it,

Atlassian, Asana all did layoffs in late 22/23

Atlassian had layoffs just last year.

It's an "and me too" business fad despite profits being already at record levels. The entire point is to suppress tech worker wages if not by explicitly-agreed conspiracy then by independently-stochastic layoffs.[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Edit: One way out for both stability and fair compensation is worker-owned co-ops. Unionizing within publicly-traded or private-equity-owned corporations is still building a sandcastle in the tidal zone.

It's more about inflation. The Fed has stated that they don't get those low interest rates back until they fire a lot of people and drive up unemployment.

EDIT: from the Chair himself

> We’re never going to say that there are too many people working, but the real point is this: Inflation—what we hear from people when we meet with them is that they really are suffering from inflation. And if we want to set ourselves up, really light the way to another period of a very strong labor market, we have got to get inflation behind us. I wish there were a painless way to do that. There isn’t. So, what we need to do is get rates up to the point where we’re putting meaningful downward pressure on inflation, and that’s what we’re doing.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCprescon...

This is hardly just his opinion either and has been pretty widely covered across the media.

https://time.com/6253699/federal-reserve-inflation-interest-...

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/07/perspectives/inflation-jobs-r...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/10/12/does-the-f...

https://www.businessinsider.com/jerome-powell-fed-jobs-unemp...

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