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Comment by jrod2121 | Hacker News Reader

Seems like every day I am now seeing multiple companies laying off X% of its workforce.

The CEOs who haven't done one yet got booted out of their country club until they do.

This is pretty normal for the start of a downturn. There's probably a bunch of forced vacation going on (or will be), too. I remember a lot of that from the healthier companies in the 2002 time frame and a friend of mine at a more hardware-oriented company told me his company is doing that.

People were saying this was the start of the downturn when layoffs happened last year then the spy moved up 100 pts since.

Despite what EMT fundamentalists will tell you, the stock market is only loosely correlated with fundamentals and 100 pts is nothing. Besides, there's no reason a company's profit _must_ decline during a downturn: for example, if they perfectly predict the downturn and reduce expenses (like laying people off) just before it hits.

Perhaps this is something to be normalised. It's perfectly feasible eBay no longer needs to build, develop and market at the pace it once did?

That's entirely possible. eBay is a very mature product, and it has been like this for years. Among the e-commerce platforms, it's still one that empowers the little people and serves a goal. I hope they won't "disrupt" it.

Alternatively, they could be in a crisis.

Every year or two Ebay rewrites their UI and makes it slightly worse. I kind of wish they'd laid off a good chunk of their designers/developers three or four UI's ago.

It's going to be normalised in the coming years, across small and huge companies. Not sure how all the web devs will adjust.

Also we aren't in 2010. You don't need to build as much in house anymore or patch up tech that doesn't scale. Modern frameworks, cloud, and open source tech makes things at least 10x easier than they used to be. We will only improve in this regard.

In the past this just meant it was easier for people to make new services and companies etc. and overall employment in the sector actually increased.

Maybe AI will change this, but we've seen plenty of doom-mongering before that never bore out.

Only if the rate of newer services/companies keep up and outweigh the ease of development we should eventually reach. People are currently still maintaining jQuery PHP and other tech that makes doing anything much more complicated than it needs to be.

might be a naive take but i think LLMs will improve the ease with which maintenance can happen. one of the major problems with older tech is finding people who are willing to work in that domain for cheap - LLMs seem to trivialise that.

How do you think they trivialize it? I've found them to be good for writing short scripts or answering a specific question. I've never seen one that you point at your own code base and have it do things like write a new endpoint that takes into account all the existing database and authentication code. If such a thing exists I'd like to know about it.

Your first sentence is describing the web based LLMs. There are others that operate against the project structure and has read all the files. But a lot of CRUDs also involve a much easier modular domain structure.

LLMs amplify you quite a bit in productivity if you're doing CRUD which is what most people are doing. You just clean up the code and clarify potential improvements.

These companies must have fallen on hard times. I feel bad for the CEOs.

> I feel bad for the CEOs.

I don't. They know exactly what they're getting into when the take the top role and frankly? They get away with a lot of stuff they shouldn't.

I feel bad for all the lives negatively impacted by the leadership at companies.

I suspect they were being sarcastic, perhaps referring to the sometimes overly extravagant lifestyles that some CEOs flaunt.

It's so hard to tell on HN. A lot here will do anything to defend leadership.

That's fair.

Some much this. If executives were held accountable and terminated for performance failures resulting in layoffs rather than rewarded with earnings bonuses I would feel more sympathy.

I love that you're being down voted by the sarcasm impaired. Or maybe you're being sarcasticly down voted. Either way it's amusing.

I think it was expected after Musk let go of so many people and technically speaking twitter is still functioning as it was with a bunch of extra features (half baked some might be).

The 5-10% layoffs in tech started well before Musk showed up at Twitter. eBay is simply copying what every tech company has done since mid-2022.

Normal. Media doing a good job. But the numbers are unexpected for me.

While NASDAQ is at an all-time high, according to some podcasts I follow, these layoffs are mostly due to AI.

How ai is influencing this?

Might be automating some moderation tasks.

AI is a buzzword that allows the layoffs to happen. I’ve yet to see any serious affect from actual AI beyond broken chat bots.

If they didn’t want to do layoffs, they’d be arguing that AI is allowing them to hire more and get more business.

> AI is a buzzword that allows the layoffs to happen

Not a single public layoff announcement has mentioned AI as the reason. In fact the current round of layoffs have been going on since before ChatGPT or Github Copilot even launched publicly.

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