this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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Man, techworkers are really into getting laid off huh?
Jokes aside, why is this happening so much recently?
Funding is drying up due to high interest rates. That’s why these kinda of layoffs happen more frequently right now.
Also, everyone’s doing it so it’s harder for an individual company to be vilified for it. They get to blame it on “market forces”
Funding drying up is real, but if you see an established profit making company doing it, just remember that whenever they do layoffs, share prices rise. The execs get big bonuses for share prices, so sacrificing employees for those bonuses is worth it to them because they are parasites on society.
The whole stock market system is parasitic.
The current system is because it has incentives for short term profiteering over steady long term profits.
There could be tax reforms to more tax capital gains for stocks held for short periods of time and discounts for stocks sold after longer periods.
This wouldn't be a magic fix but a good first step.
Another thing that would help would be banning shorting stocks. Shorting makes it more profitable for investors to take a stable, profitable company that isn't experiencing exponential growth and intentionally run it into the ground than it would be to simply let it generate long term revenues.
It's obscene that we haven't banned it and acts like it writ large. It simply shouldn't be legal to sell somebody else's property that they've loaned to you with the intention of buying another one once the price drops. It provides absolutely no value to society, is incredibly risky, and creates perverse market incentives where economic recessions and market crashes can be more profitable for some than the good times.
That still won't change the economy from exploiting workers to give value to people who've done no work at all.
It's fraudulent as fuck. Hedge funds who are also market makers (oh, sure, they claim to be 'separate' yet repeatedly get fined for their behaviour, all while not admitting fault of course). Definitely no conflict of interest there. That's before we even get into 'dark pools': https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dark-pool.asp
When a majority of trades for many companies are conducted with zero oversight, that allows bad actors to manipulate the markets. It's madness to me that this parallel system is allowed to exist. I just picked AAPL at random, 43% of trades were made 'off-exchange' yesterday. ~22m shares traded with zero price action or regulation.
https://chartexchange.com/symbol/nasdaq-aapl/exchange-volume/
But but but there's not zero oversight, they're self-regulated which always works! 🤡
For a stock to go up, the company has to make more profit.
To make more profit, they need to pay their workers less than the value of the goods or services produced.
Therefore, the stock price is a measure of how well a company can exploit its workers.
because of the eternal growth principle of capitalism. Objectively there is a point that a company cannot grow anymore. For example there cannot be infinite bands that will constantly enter bandcamp to increase their numbers. At that point the company holders find different paths, like temporarily increasing numbers by reducing the number of employees. In periods of recession and uncertainty this has a domino effect.
Around COVID tech gained a lot of popularity and especially stuff like AI/ML became the new trend, so tech companies starting hiring insane amounts of people. In the past year though companies have started realizing "oh shit, we hired way too many people" and started laying off employees (usually the most expensive/highest paid, or the most "useless" i.e. non-tech positions).
It's not really all that bad for juniors especially because now they get a big boost in their opportunities for work, especially ones that worked at the big companies that overhired a ton like Meta, because they can say "I worked for Facebook/Google/JP Morgan" or whatever the hell on there resume, which will make you EXTREMELY attractive to employers and have your application stand out almost anywhere.
At least for software development, you're kind of expected to be hopping jobs a lot because that's the only way you're really going to get more benefits and higher pay (unless you get really lucky and find a company that actually cares about retaining current employees! or you become self-employed which is probably even harder). There's practically an infinite number of jobs, many good ones, in the sphere because of how valuable tech is in the modern world, so you don't have to worry about not being able to find a position when you get some experience. That's why many companies will hire people who barely can even program, so long as they can write "hello world" in JS...
Of course there are other reasons, like outsourcing work, or the company just wanting more profit short-term, or feeling like they don't "need" as many employees since the tools for the job and the number&quality of applicants have gotten better...
this is incredibly inaccurate. we just hired for a single position and got well over 250 applicants. a junior dev friend of mine says he and none of his friends can find work. with all the layoffs tech jobs are just very scarce right now.
Fully agree. I work at a big tech company, and we've had experienced software engineers really struggle to find work, even in tech hubs like London, Barcelona, NYC, etc. We've also had apprentices leave after 4+ years without a return offer, only to find unemployment awaiting them.
Depends on where you are applying, what I said won't apply in every single municipality of course.
Prospect hire: “I worked for Facebook”
Recruiter: “So did the other 400 applicants, we don't care. How much humiliation and misery wages are you capable of taking before having a medical crisis? That's the only metric we care about.”
Now that "everyone" works from home, a lot of companies figure it cost a lot less to hire Indians to do that than Americans.
Did work from home start 30+ years ago? Because that is when companies started offshoring jobs on mass.
This isn't accurate. Outsourcing tech jobs has been a thing since the 90s. It rarely works at scale which is why it never stuck around. It's just as risky today as it was back then.
Wrong timezone, wrong first language, and a corporate culture of fake-it-till-you-make-it-and-keep-faking-it-even-after-everything-failed makes that way harder than it seems at a glance. I've worked with a lot of great Indian developers, but those great Indian developers weren't working at Satyam and the like.
I mean, to me the middle-ground is obvious. Don't outsource to India. Just outsource to Pittsburgh. Still cheaper than hiring Silicon Valley people, only 3 hours time-shift, and Yinzers speak something pretty close to English.
It's cyclical and very well understood at this point.
A business will hire a bunch of people to meet demand and then lay them off to make the company's earnings look better the following quarter.
At this point, I have no sympathy for anyone targeted by these layoffs if they work for a company that has been known to do them. Real 'leopards ate my face', vibes.