I am furious. Though I try not to humour conspiracy theories, or suggest that there is any grand overture to what is usually an uncaring and cold world, but I cannot ignore what is a transparently-synchronized movement against the tech industry’s workforce.
"Boss erotica author..." I literally busted out laughing at that one. I wish I had written it - so I am in awe of you and hate you at the same time. This article is 100% accurate and perfect. It should be added to every job posting for these companies so employees know what they are getting.
"It’s also worth considering that the people that invested in these companies, that paid for the luxurious perks at these firms, that fucking hired these people in the first place are the same people that are crowing about them being treated too well."
It sure as shit ain't the workers who asked for bean bag chairs, catered lunches, and foosball tables in place of real living wages and reasonable, predictable hours.
I like how Lloyd Hough put it: these companies are a cartel that are trying to use their monopsony power to drive down wages.
It's an open question as to whether they're a real cartel or a functional one, but I'm not sure it matters to anyone but the FTC. (Cartels are the hot new thing here at the final stages of capitalism - look at how the major consumer-products companies all spontaneously realized that they could raise their prices in concert because consumers were expecting inflation.)
This was great. Ive worked in tech for a couple of decades and this definitely tracks. None of these layoffs needed to happen at all. My company has been doing "targeted" layoffs and were still ending up rehiring ppl we fired cause, whoops! they do important work and only they know how to do it.
Our CTO will jump on an outage call and throw out bullshit so now VPs and SVPs are now also jumping on outage calls and just generally showing their asses and everyrthing is fucking chaos.
My company has done billions in buybacks and made billions in net income and yet weve been told that raises are going to be "moderate" next month. Fuck that.
Ive been FT WFH for years, long before covid, so i have been grandfathered in as i worked the system to get an "official" WFH status with HR over the years. However, lots of my coworkers whove been WFH for up to 7-8 years are now being pulled into the office 3x a week. Its insane.
Every all hands i ask for quantifiable evidence that being in the office positively affects productivity and all i get are either crickets or mngt talking about vibes, basically.
The fact that the economy at large just reported an eye-popping 500k+ new jobs while Silicon Valley is laying off means that either (a) SV is out of sync with the entire economy or (b) these were social contagion performative layoffs. Neither are good and neither justify the pop in valuation, except for the fact that the market makers also believe that firing=good.
"The tech industry hates that by creating a special class of worker, they have to cater to said worker, and pay them more for specialized skills and talents that other industries don’t."
This goes back to the work-as-religion problem. With the exception of the people who work building the products, the majority of people work in tech *because* the jobs pay well and have good perks. People aren't choosing to sell Ad Words instead of teaching yoga because they are devoted to selling Ad Words.
“These companies did not “overhire” recklessly. I believe they hired as many people as they needed to to catch consumer (or business) demand, and the second that said demand shifted back to pre-pandemic levels, they used it as an opportunity and justification to fire people that they deemed expendable.”
I think Tech Elite and Wall st. have made a category error. As you note, SV has been awash in Free (VC) Money for so long that the problem became “what to do with all the free money?” Thus the mania for crypto, AI, web3, and whatnot.
Well now the Free Money is thinning so the Elite have become dimly aware that most of that capital is actually locked up in their employees’ heads. The wise move in the old economy when rates rise is to lay off workers and if that doesn’t work, liquidate assets. So of course Wall St. loves this — the bros are doing both at the same time! But what to do when the assets *are* the workers? Maybe some of that brain capital will go crawling back to Amazon or Meta or wherever in a few months. But right now it’s floating free in the marketplace. Free as in “freedom” but also free as in “free beer.”
If there was any (capital) value in a Twitter engineer, that engineer’s brain is now loose in the job market and Twitter will never recover it, not in the way that an auto plant would recover at least a fraction of the value of its physical plant when it liquidates. The Twitter engineer will go to work somewhere else, and their new employer gains some fraction of that (capital) value…but at NO BENEFIT to Twitter.
Ed with the double gut punch for me personally, someone who was laid off by Noom in 2021 only to get a nice shiny new job at ... Ro, in January 2022. Before being laid off last summer. Cool world!
Ed and Paul S's point about human capital is correct. The thing with all these layoffs is, to the extent that they touch engineers and PMs and designers, those people are getting new jobs within ~2 months. It's not as though only Big Tech needs people who do this work. Mid-size and small tech companies, startups, and companies not traditionally considered "tech" (e.g., the legacy auto makers) are eagerly hiring anyone who is let go. Big Tech hoovered up so much talent partly as a means of preventing competition. Now at least some of that talent is available to go to other companies, or to start companies of their own.
In 12-18 months, perhaps sooner, these companies that have conducted mass layoffs will be hiring again. Except they'll spend more to hire and get less for their money because the new people will lack the institutional knowledge that the laid off people had.
I also think that with many of these elites, they saw a world in which people *not exactly like them* were gaining a semblance of power in the world. They were rattled when they were forced to have listening sessions re: Black Lives Matter, or smile through the AAPI Heritage Month Celebration, or begrudgingly public transparent pay. That's just not how the "hardcore" work at all.
Not a coincidence that the lay-offs & buybacks were announced at the same time. These companies are manipulating their stock price & there should be a rule against it - companies that perform more than 1% layoffs can’t buy back stock” or something like that.
100% this. 25yrs experience in tech. Seen waves upon waves of layoffs, not one of which resulted in long term business benefit. Agree with every articulate word written here.
"Boss erotica author..." I literally busted out laughing at that one. I wish I had written it - so I am in awe of you and hate you at the same time. This article is 100% accurate and perfect. It should be added to every job posting for these companies so employees know what they are getting.
"It’s also worth considering that the people that invested in these companies, that paid for the luxurious perks at these firms, that fucking hired these people in the first place are the same people that are crowing about them being treated too well."
It sure as shit ain't the workers who asked for bean bag chairs, catered lunches, and foosball tables in place of real living wages and reasonable, predictable hours.
I like how Lloyd Hough put it: these companies are a cartel that are trying to use their monopsony power to drive down wages.
It's an open question as to whether they're a real cartel or a functional one, but I'm not sure it matters to anyone but the FTC. (Cartels are the hot new thing here at the final stages of capitalism - look at how the major consumer-products companies all spontaneously realized that they could raise their prices in concert because consumers were expecting inflation.)
This was great. Ive worked in tech for a couple of decades and this definitely tracks. None of these layoffs needed to happen at all. My company has been doing "targeted" layoffs and were still ending up rehiring ppl we fired cause, whoops! they do important work and only they know how to do it.
Our CTO will jump on an outage call and throw out bullshit so now VPs and SVPs are now also jumping on outage calls and just generally showing their asses and everyrthing is fucking chaos.
My company has done billions in buybacks and made billions in net income and yet weve been told that raises are going to be "moderate" next month. Fuck that.
Ive been FT WFH for years, long before covid, so i have been grandfathered in as i worked the system to get an "official" WFH status with HR over the years. However, lots of my coworkers whove been WFH for up to 7-8 years are now being pulled into the office 3x a week. Its insane.
Every all hands i ask for quantifiable evidence that being in the office positively affects productivity and all i get are either crickets or mngt talking about vibes, basically.
The fact that the economy at large just reported an eye-popping 500k+ new jobs while Silicon Valley is laying off means that either (a) SV is out of sync with the entire economy or (b) these were social contagion performative layoffs. Neither are good and neither justify the pop in valuation, except for the fact that the market makers also believe that firing=good.
"The tech industry hates that by creating a special class of worker, they have to cater to said worker, and pay them more for specialized skills and talents that other industries don’t."
This goes back to the work-as-religion problem. With the exception of the people who work building the products, the majority of people work in tech *because* the jobs pay well and have good perks. People aren't choosing to sell Ad Words instead of teaching yoga because they are devoted to selling Ad Words.
“These companies did not “overhire” recklessly. I believe they hired as many people as they needed to to catch consumer (or business) demand, and the second that said demand shifted back to pre-pandemic levels, they used it as an opportunity and justification to fire people that they deemed expendable.”
#Nailedit
I think Tech Elite and Wall st. have made a category error. As you note, SV has been awash in Free (VC) Money for so long that the problem became “what to do with all the free money?” Thus the mania for crypto, AI, web3, and whatnot.
Well now the Free Money is thinning so the Elite have become dimly aware that most of that capital is actually locked up in their employees’ heads. The wise move in the old economy when rates rise is to lay off workers and if that doesn’t work, liquidate assets. So of course Wall St. loves this — the bros are doing both at the same time! But what to do when the assets *are* the workers? Maybe some of that brain capital will go crawling back to Amazon or Meta or wherever in a few months. But right now it’s floating free in the marketplace. Free as in “freedom” but also free as in “free beer.”
If there was any (capital) value in a Twitter engineer, that engineer’s brain is now loose in the job market and Twitter will never recover it, not in the way that an auto plant would recover at least a fraction of the value of its physical plant when it liquidates. The Twitter engineer will go to work somewhere else, and their new employer gains some fraction of that (capital) value…but at NO BENEFIT to Twitter.
Ed with the double gut punch for me personally, someone who was laid off by Noom in 2021 only to get a nice shiny new job at ... Ro, in January 2022. Before being laid off last summer. Cool world!
Ed and Paul S's point about human capital is correct. The thing with all these layoffs is, to the extent that they touch engineers and PMs and designers, those people are getting new jobs within ~2 months. It's not as though only Big Tech needs people who do this work. Mid-size and small tech companies, startups, and companies not traditionally considered "tech" (e.g., the legacy auto makers) are eagerly hiring anyone who is let go. Big Tech hoovered up so much talent partly as a means of preventing competition. Now at least some of that talent is available to go to other companies, or to start companies of their own.
In 12-18 months, perhaps sooner, these companies that have conducted mass layoffs will be hiring again. Except they'll spend more to hire and get less for their money because the new people will lack the institutional knowledge that the laid off people had.
I have seen many articles popping up "explaining" how valuable the commute is. "The ultimate life hack" or stuff like that.
I also think that with many of these elites, they saw a world in which people *not exactly like them* were gaining a semblance of power in the world. They were rattled when they were forced to have listening sessions re: Black Lives Matter, or smile through the AAPI Heritage Month Celebration, or begrudgingly public transparent pay. That's just not how the "hardcore" work at all.
Yup, and if you really want to chin strap the tinfoil hat on...
The elite know and understand that coder and laborer are roughly synonymous in the near immediate future.
To get much of any import done, someone will instruct a computer to do it. Those "negotiations" are basically the same as programming.
Preach!
Not a coincidence that the lay-offs & buybacks were announced at the same time. These companies are manipulating their stock price & there should be a rule against it - companies that perform more than 1% layoffs can’t buy back stock” or something like that.
100% this. 25yrs experience in tech. Seen waves upon waves of layoffs, not one of which resulted in long term business benefit. Agree with every articulate word written here.
Good on you!