Well, tech companies also do “out loud” collusion: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation - Wikipedia
It would be nice if Discourse would parse Wikipedia links just a little better. I don’t remember everything starting with ‘Pages for logged out editors.’ Did it always do that? Wrong thread I suppose. Sorry :)
Maybe Discourse needs some big tech support?
I noticed it start around the same time Wikipedia rolled out their awful, density-killing redesign. Probably changed something in how Discourse parses the page.
This seems on point to me:
The consequences are that these companies will continue to invest in things that grow the overall revenue of the company over all else. They will mass-hire and mass-fire, because there are no consequences when the markets don’t really care as long as the company itself stays valuable. Venture capitalists certainly don’t mind - after all, it’s “less burn” to “get you through” tough climates that were arguably created by the poor hiring decisions of a company that was never incentivized to hire sustainably or operate profitably.
Until we see a seismic shift in how major investors treat the companies they invest in, this cycle will continue. I guarantee that we will see each and every one of the companies doing mass layoffs do mass-hirings in the next few years, and then do another mass layoff not long after, because they are simply treating human capital as assets to be manipulated to increase the value of a stock. They are not structured to evaluate whether the business is “sustainable,” because their only interest is seeing their current profits grow by multiples that please Wall Street.
This is all true, and nothing new.
What’s the alternative, though? That you can’t ever fire workers no matter what the circumstance is?
Hoping corporations start taking anything other than profits into consideration is folly. Now some make a choice to care about other things, but there’s no reason they need to.
Is the writer of that article alleging that the companies intentionally over-hired, knowing they would be firing people a year later? I find that hard to believe. These companies are booking large charges associated with these terminations. These weren’t seasonal warehouse jobs. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m pretty sure the economics clearly would have favored not overhiring and then having to terminate.
Did these companies take a risk that they might be overhiring? Definitely. But they were also worried about underhiring, for the demand they were seeing. Demand and the general economy is hard to accurately forecast, most of the time.
Ultimately the ones that did end up with mass terminations will pay a price both in the direct costs associated with these terminations and with their reputations. One can argue that society bore a cost for their aggressive hiring (e.g., unemployment and such), but that’s a political decision that we have made in the US to have that covered on public side rather more on the private side.
Surely there are individual steps we can take to improve the lot of American workers without having to choose between radical extremes?
You’re no fun not playing along with his false dilemma.
He’s arguing that these companies are making stupid, short-sighted decisions and are being rewarded for it because the way these companies are valuated has nothing to do with solid, sustainable business fundamentals.
I think whether they turn out to be stupid, and perhaps also the short-sighted part, is only clear in hindsight. Had the economy kept going gangbusters, they would have seemed like good decisions.
Take an example of the flipside of this—the chip shortage. Some companies went super-conservative on that front, and the economy and arguably workers and society as a whole paid the price for that call. One could call that stupid and short-sighted.
They made a bad call—most of the CEOs involved have admitted that. I don’t know if the right answer is always “they should be less risk-taking”. I guess you could reasonably say they should be more conservative specifically on decisions that involve employees, but who knows how that would manifest.
I wouldnt be worrying about big tech workers if improving the lot of American workers was my goal.
They wouldn’t be the top of my list, but the treatment of workers across the US is pretty shit across the board. So they get to ride along with the rest on the Kevin Bus of Concerns. :)
I’d be more forgiving if these same companies didn’t suddenly have billions for stock buy backs and executive bonuses.
So he talks about the frothiness and outright ponziness of the modern VC game, which is a mix of cargo culting things that worked for companies that have already taken the key oppurtunities, and see no evil investment in outright fraud because you think it might work (in the sense that they can sell out before the money runs out)
But I don’t think you can draw a line from there to big tech. Big companies getting complacent and misinvesting isn’t a new phenomenon - and while it’s easy to point at meta and to a lesser extent google(*); Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are still making plenty of bets that pay off, not just in terms of revenue but in terms of genuine, business fundamentals cashflow.
(*: Search is a dumpster fire, but YouTube is low key huge, GCP is doing ok in the most significant new industry of the last decade, and Alphabet still probably have the best ML capability, which might be worth something Real Soon Now ™ )
Like the trillions of dollars they spent last year combined with this year:
“Whew! Laying off a bunch of people really drained me! Vacay!”
In the all-hands call the day after layoffs, Benioff compared losing employees to layoffs to mourning people who died. Insider reported that he showed up around 18 minutes late to a company-wide meeting the day after announcing layoffs, and then, as the Times of London reported, he joked, “Did I miss something?”
He told the NYT that he now thinks the two-hour all-hands call was a bad idea.
“We were trying to explain the unexplainable,” Benioff told the NYT. “It’s hard to have a call like that with such a large group and have it be effective, and we paid a price.”
Not so hard to explain. Corporations usually prioritize profit over people, so they treat people as expendable. At least he had Big Ted Cruz Energy about the whole thing. Gotta run off to paradise while the plebs suffer!
“A man is not a piece of fruit.”
“Whoopsie-doodle! A series of reckless and ongoing mistakes have and are being made by someone with my job title, and believe me, we’re definitely paying the price. Just a real humdinger of a situation.”