Tech Layoffs Keep Coming. Why Is Head Count Barely Budging? | Hacker News Reader

Tech Layoffs Keep Coming. Why Is Head Count Barely Budging?

wsj.com

29 pointssamspenc23 comments

Headcount isn't going down because the layoffs aren't principaled actions to "right-size" companies, but rather convenient buttons pushed to make numbers look better. The underlying causes of headcount growth are never meaningfully addressed afterwards, so any losses are quickly grown back after a token hiring freeze.

Pump the numbers and hire new scrubs in the next quarter for less than what the previous person was making. Do it industry wide and you reset baseline pay which drives profit up further.

Don't have access to the full article, but off shoring seems like a big factor. Lot of laid off teams are being reconstituted in LCOL countries like Romania and India

Yep this is it.

Of course during the first RTO push I repeatedly told all my colleagues that the natural evolution in the minds of leadership is going to be "if their job can be done from Lake Tahoe it can be done from Bangalore."

Now our company is implementing a McKinsey designed plan to move the bulk of our employment to India. The expectation is that headcount will go up but with much cheaper resources. McKinsey insists that they've done this a bunch of times with different companies and it's gone swell.

> "if their job can be done from Lake Tahoe it can be done from Bangalore."

Yep! I explicitly warned about this happening on HN multiple times during that time period because I myself have done this for employers, but no one listened and downvoted me.

I'm getting great schacenfreude.

Replaced in-house engineering with off-shore? Personally, I can’t imagine feeling okay doing that, let alone schadenfreude… why?

Management types have selection pressures that favor specifically selecting for an ability to dehumanize. This is not necessarily coupled with any great excess of foresight.

It's still in-house engineering, but now now it's abroad.

And schacenfrude for warning this exact thing would happen due to RTO

It can go "swell", but when it doesn't then it's a train wreck of the worst sort. And boy do the blame and the finger pointing go into overdrive when the wreck happens.

In France, the bank 'Société Générale' did that 15 years ago, 5th biggest French bank and at the time they decided to do that, probably the bank with the best IT systems (they had less legacy systems than bigger banks and did better tech choices).

It's now still the 5th biggest bank, they bought an online bank, and are restructuring because of all the French banks, it's the one that spend the most in IT (at least it was 2 years ago). The CFO/CEO who pushed for this got out with a lot of money (Oudea, his wife is in charge of the Olympic games this summer).

A lot of this is also to right size the inflated compensation given out in 2022-2023. My company(US based) has been stack ranking aggressively to manage people out but we have 2x the headcount available to hire this year. They are trying to uplevel the force in their own words, I don’t think it’s good for existing employee morale though.

No Javascript:

https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=4966224846734&w=kl1SG9vCCn...

https://archive.is/Hpzme

Would genuinely like to know what additional value Amazon is getting from hiring nearly, what, 900k people since 2018?

I mean, seriously, what do they all do?

I can't fathom onboarding that many people in that space of time and integrating them into an employment structure in any reasonable way. It seems like 75% of your existing workforce would have to be dedicated to onboarding and training.

How are you seriously bringing that many people onboard and having them genuinely contribute?

Its mostly likely storage/logistics workers. Their shipping volume likely significantly increased since 2018, which is reflected in revenue numbers.

Amazon is also infamous for high turnover rates. I doubt even a quarter of those 900k still work there.

base on their 10q/k it looks like they increased headcount including turnover by that number

Their median stay is less than a year, isn't it ?

The figures quoted revolve around the size of the company _today_ - so even if only one quarter of that 900k stayed, that means they onboarded even to make up for whomever left.

As others have pointed out: logistics.

E.g. the German postal service employs some 600k people. DHL is another 600k. The logistics union has like 1.3M members. That's like 2% of all employees in Germany.

Those are labor intensive jobs. With minimal training.

It's a huge sector that you usually don't see (well, except for all that truck traffic).

They haven't pointed anything out, they just guessed.

I want to _actually know_ what those people are doing.

Just look it up.

Here is the pure number of facilities in Germany (2021)... Verdi (the relevant union) is collecting this data and distributing it.

17 fulfillment centers (logistics) 47 distribution centers (logistics) 7 sorting centers (logistics) 2 amazon fresh centers(logistics) 2 customer service centers 3 AWS centers 4 development centers

19k of the 28k workers are working in the fulfillment centers.

paywall?

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