Comment on It’s a dark time to be a tech worker right now

mercan@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Because the big tech companies are laying off, all the tech companies have decided they too need to layoff people to lower costs, improve profits, report better earnings, etc.

  Fast forward to next year when they’re up shit creek because their skeleton crews can’t possibly do All The Things. Executives retire, take huge bonuses; repeat.

  source

  • SkyNTP@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There’s no evidence that the layoffs at these firms are actually tech workers.

    source

    • macaroni1556@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      What on earth do you mean no evidence? I mean just check layoffs.fyi which specifically tracks this.

      source

      • EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I’m trying to find where on the site where it tracks the type of employees laid off but it doesn’t seem to track that at all?

        source

        • -> View More Comments
    • rambaroo@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You don’t know what you’re talking about. I personally know multiple devs who were laid off from my company. These companies don’t give a shit about your skills anymore, they’re purely looking at how much money you cost them.

      source

      • EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Dev’s are getting laid off, but he actually does have a point that in the case of several of the biggest companies, the hardest hit were middle management, not devs.

        source
  • uis@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Reminds joke from Ekaterina Shulman:

    New governor gets elected and old governor says to new one: “In my office there is safe, there are three letters in it. When you can’t hold your position read one letter.”

    Letters were:

    1. Blame everything on me
    2. Fire deputy
    3. Write 3 letters to next governor

    source
• ricecake@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Interest rates were low, which made banks lend money very cheaply. It also led to a lot of money being put in the stock market, which made it go up.

  Companies used that money to, in part, hire people. A lot of people. The stock market doing well also means businesses try to grow, because everyone is spending more money.

  Interest rates are starting to come back up. This means loans are more expensive, which means there’s less cash available. It also means there’s less money in the stock market.

  Less cash on hand and lower stock value makes businesses want to cut costs, and people are very expensive, particularly in the tech sector.

  Additionally, commercial real estate is running into major problems: people don’t want or need to work in offices.
  This means the contracts are being allowed to expire, and less money for the large companies that own the properties.

  A lot of money is invested in these companies. Anticipation of them doing badly makes companies fear an economic downturn.

  So with less money available, less tolerance for risk in the stock market, and a fear of a significant economic upset, companies are looking to cut expenses, and people hired because cash was cheap and risk was okay are easy to justify cutting.

  They ideally would like to let go of people they can do without, keep their stock price high, and when the market bottoms out spend the cash they can justify with their high price to buy viable companies at a discount.

  source

  • mercan@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Thank you!

    source
• eyes@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The industry is experiencing historic shrinkage post COVID due to unsustainable growth during COVID.

  source

  • MajorHavoc@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Any evidence to back up using the word “historic”, here? The dotCom burst was historic, but by the numbers I’ve seen, this doesn’t come close.

    I would argue “interesting footnote in the boom/bust cycle”.

    I know that’s not how it feels to the folks going through job searches right now, though.

    source

    • rambaroo@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s the worst market since 2008. I don’t know why people feel the need to minimize it. It’s certainly more than a footnote.

      source

      • MajorHavoc@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        And 2008 was the worst since the the great depression. In between we saw the dotCom bust, which was itself the worst since the slump in the 80s.

        But the boom and bust cycle is well established.

        We don’t do eachother any favors by talking like it’s the end of the world this time.

        I suspect the sensational headlines are meant to distract from systemic issues that feed the cycle.

        As long as the narrative is “this time is unique”, it distracts from discussing improving the situation.

        I don’t mean to minimize it, though. It sucks!

        source
• aew360@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Startups need a lot of capital flowing in because they don’t turn a profit early on. Traditional smaller businesses usually don’t have this sort of funding because the reward is lower. With tech, there’s a strong chance that company could become public or could get bought out. Or it could stay private and eventually become profitable. Regardless, they need investments made so they can continue to operate to eventually deliver a valuable product that will possibly offer significant returns to the investors.

  The pandemic happened, which led to several outcomes. For one, a lot of boomers retired. Boomers were earning a lot of money. Then they stopped earning money and started dipping into their savings. This had a strong reaction. Capital became more scarce. Don’t believe me? Look at what banks are paying for 12-month CDs and the interest rates in savings accounts. It’s insanely high compared to two or three years ago.

  This trend likely won’t last forever. Gen Xers and millennials have been moving into vacated roles by the boomers and are now earning more than before. They’re able to generate excess capital that investors can use to fund startups. There’s no shortage of innovative ideas in the western world, but there is a shortage of capital.

  Not every county in the west is going to recover the same way. The boomer generation is the largest generation in history. Not every country kept having kids at a relatively similar pace. Typically, developing countries have much higher population growth. As countries industrialize, we see certain trends like both men and women joining the workforce and people moving to the cities for work. People generally have fewer kids with these trends as they are more focused on their careers and have less room to raise them. Nobody wants to raise a child in a one-bed apartment!

  The United States is one of the rare exceptions. With a trend of consistent domestic population growth and immigration, the U.S. has avoided the fallout from rapid industrialization. Because of that, we’re seeing some interesting trends:

  • Under Biden, the post-pandemic POTUS, the U.S. has entered a prolonged period of rapid onshoring of manufacturing jobs. The addition of factories, distribution centers, and more have been increasing exponentially.

  • Germany, Italy, South Korea, Japan, and other similar economies have seen the impacts of a shrinking younger population and a ballooning senior population. These nations will likely keep the design of their products onshore, but will send manufacturing offshore. The U.S. and Mexico are the biggest winners here, but Mexico is at a disadvantage compared to the U.S. due to a greater difficultly in maintaining infrastructure.

  • Emerging technologies make the production of goods in the U.S. more feasible. Advancements in AI, robotics, and renewable energy will make production in the U.S. more logical despite the higher wages its workers command because less workers will be needed, or other savings in the realm of security, stability, and access to transportation infrastructure offset that factor.

  There will not only be excess capital generation in the U.S., but there will also be excess capital flowing into the U.S. It’s also not to say that tech jobs will never recover outside of the U.S., but the reality is that we are in a capital shortage for a specific, acute reason. Less people of working age able to not only fill the vacated roles left by boomers, but also difficultly in paying the pensions and benefits offered to retirees. This will dry up even more capital in those particular nations.

  Tech jobs have always been finicky. That won’t change going forward. But if you’re in the U.S., there’s a strong chance you’ll see things bounce back quicker than they will in other countries.

  source

  • mercan@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Wow, thanks for such a thorough answer!

    source
• stevecrox@kbin.run ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The Silicon Valley companies massively over hired.

  Using twitter as an example, they used to publicly disclose every site and their entire tech stack.

  I have to write proposals and estimates and when Elon decided to axe half the company of 8000 I was curious..

  I assigned the biggest functional team I could (e.g. just create units of 10 and plan for 2 teams to compete on everything). I assumed a full 20 person IT department at every site, etc.. Then I added 20% to my total and then 20% again for management.

  I came up with an organisation of ~1200, Twitter was at 8000.

  I had excluded content moderators and ad sellers because I had no experience in estimating that but it gives a idea of the problem.

  I think the idea was to deny competition people but in reality that kind of staff bloat will hurt the big companies

  source

  • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    While you’re right that many tech companies overhired, they overhired into an increasing market. Multiple companies, including Twitter, then over-fired and ended up trying to get employees to boomerang or otherwise hire into positions that they cut. Other companies, like Apple, expanded but did not overhire, and as a result have not done mass layoffs.

    I also have no idea how you come up with a 20 person IT department at every site when internet services companies live and breathe on IT services. Everything from data centers costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to making sure devs can commit code and that backups get made takes IT services. I’m not sure what industry you’re in but you’re vastly under-budgeting and setting yourself up for failure, exactly the same way Elon is doing. Elon managed to crash twitter’s valuation by a whopping 90% inside of a year. If the cuts he made were justified, the line would have gone in the other direction.

    Content moderators and ad sellers are literally the entire point of having a company like Twitter. Curation is the product, and the ad buyers - not the users - are the ones paying the bills.

    So, yes - companies hired because they needed to hit production targets during Covid that were not sustained by continued market levels post-pandemic. That’s always going to result in cuts.

    But a lot of what we’re seeing right now is upper management/c-suite types seeing how close they can cut costs to the bone without it hitting the quarterlies as production falls off and reliability tanks, and just hoping to make it out the door before that happens.

    source

    • stevecrox@kbin.run ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Firstly it was just a bit of fun but from memory...

      Twitter was listed as having 2 data centers and a couple dozen satellite offices.

      I forgot the data center estimate, but most of those satelites were tiny. Google gave me the floor area for a couple and they were for 20-60 people (assuming a desk consumes 6m2 and dividing the office area by that).

      Assuming an IT department of 20 for such an office is rediculous but I was trying to overestimate.

      source

      • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I am an engineering manager at a FAANG company and I get that it was mostly in fun, but as a professional who does this for a living I just wanted to point out that not only were you wildly wrong, literally Elon Musk’s lived and executed experience proves you wildly wrong.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
    • rambaroo@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Most of these execs actually believed that covid demand would become permanent. What they did was incredibly stupid and irresponsible, and now workers are paying for it

      Most of these people are total followers. They just do whatever Google does because thats what dipshit investors want. There was no reason for my company to overhire to the degree it did, we were already able to meet demand… hiring people doesn’t magically increase your capacity to service more users. So fucking stupid. If I can help it I’ll never work for an idiotic public company again.

      source