Tinfoil hat: the cuts have nothing to do with market fundamentals, but are rather collusion by the big players to drop tech salaries. Bytedance is outside the clique.
I doubt it's conscious collusion, it seems more like network effects: if everyone around you is dropping employees, it makes sense to do so at the same time so you don't get negative media coverage were you to do it independently. If you do it now, it just seems like you're following the crowd.
So while it might seem like active collusion, it's more than likely just emergent game theoretic behavior.
Who was the first person to kick it off? Microsoft? Google? Meta? Meta had a reason because their stock tanked due to Apple's privacy changes or whatever.
what's your personal take: we're in a recession (the beginning, the middle, the end?) or it hasn't even started yet? how long until it starts? how long will it last?
A couple of months back I posed the same question, and a mob came out of the woodwork denying any recession.
Then we started having news of thousands of layoffs every couple of weeks.
I too wonder how the perception has changed in the meantime - and what the effect of a tech recession/layoffs spree will be on the general economy and real businesses.
We are in the recession but the media and political world are so scared of it they keep saying we're on the verge of it, for months. Or they blame COVID or the war in Europe.
So everybody now believes that until it is called as such, everything is fine.
I've heard this theory a number of times. I'm not against it. I just don't understand how it would work. Wouldn't salaries just increase again once everybody starts hiring? If this theory is true, all these layoffs are leaving these companies understaffed. Meaning they need to hire everyone back eventually.
1. layoffs make people desperate and reset the expectations. Eg I made 300k at Google but when unemployed I’ll take a job for 100k at a random company. Then Google can hire back at 200k and be the top salary again.
2. Layoffs make the employees scared of being laid off. They don’t expect raises, just employment. They work harder for less just to keep a job. Look at Amazon announcing most people won’t get a raise or even a stock refresh with the stock crash.
This works at scale even as some individuals and companies don’t comply.
Bonus: layoffs (somewhat) reset the cost basis of the company and save a ton in a long term downturns. It gives cover to kill that blockchain department that everyone realizes they don’t need.
1. There are a finite number of software engineers capable of competing with FAANG.
2. You outbid outsiders. At times, talk to your friends and tell them not to gum up intra-clique recruiting.
3. This continues for a long time, but at some point, salaries get a little too high.
4. Flush everyone all at once... resetting the baseline of what a tech salary "should be." This resets expectations for all the new talent coming in that might compete with you.
5. After the tech salary "should be" a few tens of thousands less... quietly start (2) again.
If you time it right, (2) happens when money is cheap and it's easy to found a competitor, while (4) happens when there is a "tech downturn" and VC are scared. What a tech salary "should be" is quite sticky, it takes a few years of (2) to actually change baseline expectations.
The existing cultural understanding of what tech workers "should be making" influences: what do the most promising new hires demand? how aggressive are your existing workers in asking for a raises, promos, etc? what do people take as a "given" and what do they think is a reach for them? These things operate as a sort of piggy bank. Every time you outbid a startup for promising talent, you are drawing from the piggy bank; that person tells their friends, makes a post on linkedin about it, which causes subsequent outbiddings to cost, pound for pound, ever so slightly more. When the piggy bank is empty, you refill it again by traumatizing everyone with a big, industry-wide layoff. But: you can only do this if you have a big hammer to wield.
As a bonus, if you can be a little bit discerning in your firings, you actually can shed dead weight in the process.
This is still taking a pretty big bet that hiring won't cost them more in a few years with inflation anyway, compared to retaining employees and just giving them the expected yearly payraise
> 2010 United States Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust action ... Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay
had colluded to not hire workers from each other, to suppress salaries. Facebook actually didn't play along, ultimately leading to the decade's compensation explosion.
> just increase again once everybody starts hiring
How long until that? 12 months, 18 months?
If you got fired from your $180k/yr job in 2023 and inflation is another 6% this year (after being 8% last year), you need a $190k/yr job in 2024 to have broken even, right?
Patagonia here is the exception, that's why we're all here talking about it!
I didn't want to give my bit of power to my health insurer, but guess what, I have to have healthcare to live and there's effectively one local hospital I can choose.
I didn't want to give my ~~~bit~~~ hefty chunk of power to the company that gatekeeps the patent on insulin, but I really didn't have much choice on that one.
I didn't want to give my bit of power to the telecom conglomerate, but did I have a choice? I need to be online to participate in today's society.
I didn't want to give my bit of power to Google, but... uhh actually I didn't give it to them, they stole it by spying on me.
The reality is that concentrations of power that are inherent to our system of free exchange inevitably congeal into something that looks a lot less free. All of these examples (and there are so many, most of our economy is like this!) don't really represent individual value functions, because when power gets concentrated enough, it becomes possible to take choice away.
Health insurance and medical care are all highly regulated industries with exceptionally high cost of entry; one could call it a broken market. It's not competitive at all. I always marvel at how much better the whole experience is when I take my dog to the vet than when I myself go see a doctor, and can't help but wonder if there wasn't so much state intervention (or even just wiser intervention) in medicine, my experience would be different.
Forms of insulin for which the patent has expired are affordable. The stuff under patent is expensive but objectively better at its job. One could argue that the forms in between (patent recently expired but not widely available as generics in the market) are again due to the result of onerous regulations keeping competition out of that market.
Telecommunications, at least the hardwired kind, is a natural monopoly and I wish some smarter incentive-structuring would take place in that market; maybe public ownership of the infrastructure with competitive private service providers operating on top of it. Wireless is generally more competitive and you can actually be online for less money than you think.
I'm not sure what your point was about Google? You certainly don't have to use their services.
I didn't want to seem long winded, but the market structures you describe are common to many if not most markets we have for goods and services, at least here in the US.
For example:
Food, agriculture, energy, media (print/radio/movies/home video), most commodities, productive inputs... there is little that you can buy that is not part of what I would loosely call a "conglomerate" -- that is, a concentration of capital so large and intense that it tends to influence the markets in which it operates. In fact, markets are today less competitive than they have ever been.
Those things that are (I would argue, seem) "competitive" here, like fashion, consumer products, and the like, are frequently as or more exploitative and influence markets (specifically, labor markets) abroad, up to and including slavery. Just because we don't feel that pain doesn't mean others are free of it.
This is because we have done nearly nothing, culturally, politically, economically, or psychologically, to stop the movement of power -- just as you described -- out of the hands of the many people and into the hands of the few entities that control such markets.
The free market, where each individual has the power of their dollar, is delicate indeed. Much more delicate than we have appreciated in the last several decades.
In light of recent events, the only conclusion I can arrive at is that originalism as a legal theory was a decades-long project created with the express purpose of overturning the Warren-era jurisprudence. Roe is the first salvo, but there are many more regressions coming.
It was not created as a good-faith "alternate interpretation." It is not a cohesive or logical theory. It is, instead, a weapon, whose targets should be clear to everyone now. The way the weapon works is that you assume that it is being made in good faith and engage with it on its own terms. And then, again and again, get owned. Because the other guy is just making stuff up, and you, the sucker, are actually arguing.
I'm not quite in conspiracy territory yet, but I really would like to know what they are saying out loud behind closed doors at the Federalist Society HQ.
The counter-point would be the criminal legal system, which has spectacularly failed to resist the influence of injustice, and not just historically! I suppose if you have only spent time in civil proceedings (depending on the type of proceeding...) you could hold the view that it is mostly free of corruption. On the federal judiciary, I think we really ought to dispense of the idea that political influence is somehow separate from jurisprudence. Recent events ought to have made that clear.
I'm a little bothered by how sacred the courts are in public imagination. I think it's actually harmful to consider them so. We deny that the courts are a fallible institution, which at times enables and empowers bad actors, at our peril.
Think of the median income of a country that you might imagine is a "nice" place to live. I found a source that lists them all (in fictitious "international dollars", not USD). So here's a few:
* USA: $19,300
----
* France: $16,300
* Japan: $14,200
* Israel: $10,800
* UK: $14,800
* Spain: $11,800
Wow, we are so much richer than those guys. Our quality of life must be higher, right? This extra 30% money for everyone(!) must translate to a higher standard of living. Maybe we work more than people in those countries, but it translates to: less air pollution, quieter streets, less time spent commuting, more pleasant built environments, more beautiful cities, better health, more civil services, better parks and public facilities ...
Nope. All that money just goes to cars. We make an extra 30% -- and then turn around and burn it, literally, in cars, making everyone poorer, more atomized, more depressed, more unhealthy. For an unlucky hundreds of thousands of us per year, we are physically hurt; for 35,000 of us, we are killed!
You make a good case that his real contribution is merely writing checks to smart people. I would argue, however, that this doesn't need to come along with his baggage in terms of his distracting social media activities. It's pure self indulgence on his part, and likely making a lot of smart people not interested in his money regardless of how big the checks are.
I would like a Kerbal Space Program esque aircraft design + fly game.
We already have very sophisticated dynamical models for how airplanes fly (which are deftly integrated into flight simulators) but no way of designing custom airframes.
I'm thinking that you design an aircraft: choose wing cross section shape, taper, sweep, position, control surfaces, etc. You could choose materials (ok maybe no aeroelastic stuff, just weight and failure from stress).
Then you can fly it around for fun in a realistic simulator, combat with other players, or some other mission (range? transportation aircraft? etc.)
