A good friend of mine from undergrad was one of the casulties, but as they worked on Stadia they had a feeling it was coming.
The only good thing is that they’d been with Google over a decade so with the base severance and the bump up for each additional year they’re not in any immediate danger.
Listening to Waypoint Radio yesterday I really liked a phrase that Renata Price used when discussing all of these layoffs - “Efficiency theatre”. Just as with security theatre all of this does nothing to actually improve the companies, it’s just the only thing the executives can come up with to appear to be taking action since we already know they are bad at their jobs.
I mean, does Sundar have anything to show for his time leading Alphabet? I see a lot of dead messaging platforms, a dead game streaming service, a dead VR platform, and a successful phone platform, ad platform and search engine that were already there. Has Alphabet released a single successful new product under him?
Perfect. I mean MS is set to spaff away 30 billion plus on this years NFT/DAO hype train: GPT. Facebook 100 billion on “stop saying Meta, it will never happen”. They’re all bad at their business.
I remember saying to our HR manager that those personality type tests, Voigt Kampf or whatever, were useless and she said “but Google use them and they are the best”. They really have great PR in tech.
As pointed out above they really seem to want a recession. Laying off lots of people, that contracts the economy. They hate a tight labour market. So do central banks. Hard right economic orthodoxy is walking us into a recession for the sake of capital as usual.
My impression (which may or may not be correct) is that there aren’t too many visionary leaders in charge of major tech companies right now who actually have good ideas for new products and services that would require staffing up for. In the early 2000’s Apple was releasing a ton of new, popular products that the public couldn’t get enough of, but ever since then it seems like they’ve just been putting out slightly updated versions of the same thing. Zukerberg obviously doesn’t know what he’s doing with his Metaverse and Microsoft hasn’t been doing anything especially revolutionary for a long time.
There probably are a lot of very talented people getting laid off who do have great, innovative ideas for new kinds of products but you also need a company leader who recognizes good ideas when he or she hears them.
Is that true? Or is it part of the boom bust cycle of free market investor driven capitalism? I am not an economist, so I really don’t know.
I don’t think it has to be a feature of an economy if the economic system is not based on the idea of constant growth at all costs, with the benefits of that growth accruing to the few rather than being distributed equitably between all parties
If it’s about money it doesn’t have to be that. At large, established companies reducing headcount always leads to a short-term boost in share price. It may only be a one-day bump but that’s enough to make a lot of money.
They also probably self-justify that they’re doing their part to help the Fed reduce inflation. They’re not getting any instructions from on high but they watch the economy closely and think they can help engineer a “soft” recession (playing with the lives of their employees in the process).
There’s also some technocratic ego-stroking for them in the idea that their industry’s actions lead the way for the entire economy.
So yes, a lot of this talk of recession by these big tech executives is a prophecy that’s not only self-fulfilling but also self-interested.
It’s true to the extent that any economy can’t keep expanding indefinitely on a straight-line rate. Stuff happens beyond anyone’s control: a bad harvest, foreign wars, demographic changes, political upheaval, etc. The investor herd mentality plays a part here but it’s only one factor.
The boom-bust cycle is different, with hypsters promoting the next big surefire thing (that stops being a lock) that will go on forever (until it suddenly doesn’t).
I think that it’s an inevitable result of resources that are not only limited, but that also fluctuate in availability due to factors that are unpredictable and uncontrollable.
This was expected though right? Fighting inflation… This was the goal of that wasn’t it? Companies hire with debt so now that hiring all those people costs more they have to go. Probably scrapping or tabling some future projects too.
I guess I always thought of recessions as the result of a market bubble popping since that has been my experience of them (in the US, under capitalism) while other things like droughts, famines, and other things like that were different, though they might have a similar impact
Like I said, IANAE, so it’s good to question my assumptions!
IANAE either. It’s easy to confuse things, but the thing that helped me is understanding (despite everything capitalism tells us) that a recession is something that happens to the economy as a whole rather than just to the stock market.
Wait! You mean to tell me that the stock market is not the economy!?!
My God! What else did Alan Greenspan lie to me about!?
I also am not an economist, but it seems that recessions usually have an inciting incident that sets off a chain reaction in which the reactions to the initial incident do more damage than the incident itself.
Whether the initial incident causes a stock crash as a kind of bellwether or whether the stock crash itself is the inciting incident is harder to pin down, but I would wager that laying off tens of thousands of employees all at once at the earliest signs of trouble only makes things worse for the economy as a whole.
IME stock crash itself is almost never the inciting incident even if it is the thing most people notice first.
Like even in the dotcom bust the stocks dropping were reacting to predictions and perceptions. Less capital clarified the markets for speculators and investors and the revelation was painful… but it wasn’t the cause.
Done on a mass scale it theoretically should reduce inflation. Of course, real-life is never as theoretical as economists think it is. Cold comfort to those laid-off employees either way.
“damn food and rent is too expensive we need better wages!”
“No, you need lower wages for long enough to eventually force landlords to lower rents”
“Ok but what do I eat in the meantime and where do I live?”
“Well it would technically happen faster if you died”
And then, when the economy is in the doldrums, there’s only one thing to get it out: austerity!
Thanks, Lumburgh!
…to find a better place to work.
15 years in corporate america says this is a naive take.
I went to college in the post dotcom bust (don’t major in software there’s no money in it). I started working into the corporate world during the 2008 market crash when the search for lowest pay workers gave me an “in” (if we call it an internship we can use full time hours and pay part time wages). Worked my way up from there and ended up in an old established company with a shaky future (check out my bootstraps!) Layoffs were regular and I survived many.
People who know how to game their work environment will survive however they need to in it performance be damned. Cronyism will always win. Metrics will never be accurate or fair. Value is subjective and as it is subjective there is no way to always be right. Social perceptions of value vary greatly and are certainly subject to personal bias. Cuts will just as often be made based on salary meaning the hardest working person may get cut in favor of some one new who makes less even if ultimately down the line two or more people end up hired to fill the role. Not to mention what gets cut may be whole projects or departments and whomever works in them and can’t get out when the rumors are flowing will simply have to try to get hired again or retire or…well whatever they do really. Institutional knowledge will be shuffled and lost. Some of it will have been useless but some of it will end up re-evolving with whomever is around in the next wave of growth. Infrastructure projects may be delayed until moments of crises and opportunity cost will be realized. It will simply never work cleanly or idealistically… ever. It’s a shake up. Bitter feelings lead to leaked intel. Sometimes a company handles it well and sometimes it’s part of a death spiral. Feels the same while you are in it. There’s all the fairness and logic and ideal outcomes that are found in any other human crisis big or small.
Just like “inflation” right before the US elections. Suddenly, it’s no big thing. There’s so much group think in boardrooms that they act like a cockroach colony, almost like they are one organism. After all, once you’re a CO, you get invited to be on other company’s boards. It’s a big club - one that they beat humanity with.
Right? Remember three months ago when there were worker shortages and companies were hiring like mad while all media channels everywhere blasted anyone in earshot for being lazy and not filling them fast enough?
Whiplash!
