I try not to be this person all the time. But occasionally I like to gently remind people that the causality is backwards. Google’s profits are soaring in part because they’re doing layoffs. That’s why they are doing layoffs. There are always 2 ways to increase profits. Make more revenue or decrease operating expenses. (Hint: paying employees is an operating expense) https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/112360560095763105
@janl@polotek Not to change the subject, but how does having a mix of males and females work out? I'm told that the females will fight over the males. (We only have two: an elderly female and a young male.)
I’ve talked about the stock market more on Twitter and Bluesky than I have here. Learning to follow financial news has helped me to make sense of what’s happening in the world. It doesn’t make it better. But it at least makes more sense.
The short version is that high interest rates are squeezing profits. Tech companies still have to look like they’re growing and profitable or their stock price goes down. The market is pressuring them to be “leaner and more efficient”. That means layoffs.
I’m not saying this is the one explanation for everything. I don’t like that kind of simplification. But I do think this issue is upstream of a lot of other things that are falling apart. When times are fat, a lot of dysfunction can be hidden or papered over. When times get hard, that’s when the hammer falls.
When I say “the market is putting pressure on companies”, it’s not some hand-wavy thing. I mean that’s what humans are saying. The humans who spend all of their time doing machinations to make stock prices go up or down so they can come out ahead. Those people are worried about interest rates.They’re seeing their investment returns dry up. They have to sell stock so they can pay their own growing interest payments. The result is the market equivalent of “belt tightening”.
But those people work very hard not to talk about how all of this stuff has impacts on real people. They have lots of different ways of talking about reducing employee overhead without calling it that. But if you learn to speak the language, you can hear it. Search for “stock-based compensation” and read the conversations. Tech employees are under fire right now in the market. They view us as expensive leeches sucking up all of their “alpha”.
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