The U.S. economy is booming. So why are tech companies laying off workers?::undefined
Using out of touch metrics that say nothing about how the median household is doing is not helpful.
On the other hand if you measure by how much the shareholders are getting richer, the layoffs are exactly why the economy is considered booming. Record layoffs lead to record short term profits for the wealthy few.
Combined with billions in weapons being ordered and produced, oil producing competition being crushed, while gimping Europs growth. The Chinese hurting from the Evergrande debacle and the lithography embargo.
Plenty of reasons for the US as an entity to celebrate.
Layoffs hurt GDP generally, but GDP doesn’t really care as long as “value” is created elsewhere. Like you said, none of the measurements they use care about the median income. It’s usually just generic measurements of “value” that don’t mean anything for the people of a nation.
It’s pretty clear to me that many companies are jumping on the layoff bandwagon right now since so many others are doing it too (doesn’t look as bad if your layoffs are drowned out in the noise). Easy way to increase profitability (on paper) and not look quite as bad if “everyone else is doing it.”
Laying people off is a way to juice the stock price in the short term. So perhaps the “economy is booming” because of the layoffs?
Absolutely, layoffs are exactly why some tech companies can boast of record profits.
The same reason everything costs more without there being inflation, greed and the never ending desire to make the line go up. At the end of the day that’s all a publicly traded company cares about. Line go up. They will do whatever they can legally, or hidden from legal scrutiny to make that happen.
All hail the Line!
The line has spoken, it said “I am a line.”
I am a stick.
But you could be
firea green up-lineBut I am a stick!
Money isn’t free anymore and they have a lot of debt
And
Elon broke the seal on firing huge swaths of a tech workforce to make your numbers look better.
Elon broke the seal on firing huge swaths of a tech workforce to make your numbers look better.
Don’t give him too much credit, it’s hardly the first time the tech sector has gone through this cycle. Elon had to do it because he massively overpaid for Twitter. The fact that his layoffs came at the front of this wave is probably just coincidence.
I really think a lot of this is “the other popular kids are doing it” and boards and VC saying basically the same thing to the c-suite.
You need more upvotes.
High interest rates are here, and it’s likely to be some time before we get back down to the 1% interest rates we saw during covid (or even before).
Companies are shifting either to real or imagined pressures of the stick market. And those pressures are less about chasing unlimited growth and want to see some return.
Ergo. Layoffs. Meta producing dividends.
If interest rates stay high, I’d expect to see large megacorps shift more and more to profitability over growth.
The layoffs are precisely why the “economy” is “booming”.
Nah, reducing costs in one relatively small sector doesn’t affect the GDP or other national-level metrics.
I asked an executive this very question, and he said that the board was getting pressure from stock-holders to reduce headcounts, and justifying that pressure by pointing to other large companies who had already undertaken massive layoffs, and the resulting rise in their stock prices. In this way layoffs become a game of follow the leader – or like a contagion. “Google just fired a third of their workforce, why are we doing that? We should do what they did, look how successful they are.”
Schrodinger’s economy
You have to open the box to find out if the economy is alive or dead.
I’m told the box once belonged to Pandora.
<Brad Pitt through tears and a contorted face>
“What’s in the box?!?!”
Even the state of the economy is spun these days. Who even knows at this point, depending who you ask and what factors you look at.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Chavez is one of hundreds of thousands of tech workers who’ve been laid off in the past two years in what now seems like a never-ending wave of cuts that has upended the culture of Silicon Valley and the expectations of those who work at some of America’s richest and most powerful companies.
Last year, tech companies laid off more than 260,000 workers according to layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi, cuts that executives mostly blamed on “over-hiring” during the pandemic and high interest rates making it harder to invest in new business ventures.
And where we can find efficiencies and do more with less, we’re going to do that as well,” Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said in response to a reporter’s question during a Thursday media earnings call.
Unable to get back to the showstopping revenue growth of years past, tech executives are opting instead to put a positive spin on things for Wall Street by continuously cutting high-paid workers instead.
Even with several years of experience in software engineering, data science and manufacturing, including at Microsoft, laid-off Amazon contractor Jennifer Pearl said landing an interview has been tough.
For a former Meta user experience researcher in the Bay Area, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid hurting her future employment prospects, the job hunt has been tough since her layoff last April.
The original article contains 1,321 words, the summary contains 225 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I can summarize more. Greed.
Let us also not forget that AI does not work. They made internal promises to themselves about how it was going to radically transform everything, within the next couple of quarters it seems, and when those “promises” did not materialize… the workers are the ones holding the bag (not “blamed”, yet jobless all the same). So much irony at every single level. Like AI really will transform everything, but dayum give it a second will you?
In short: everything is performing fully normally, more’s the pity:-(.
I wonder if it isn’t a symptom of things going from high competition environment between new internet services and older stuff like cable to more established systems of revenue which don’t have as much incentive to compete for workers or market share. So maybe that’s the end result of approaching monopoly.
The US Economy is only booming for rich people.
The past 40 years have shown me that no matter how well the economy is doing in the news, it doesnt mean shit for most Americans.
That does not explain it either
Wealthy shareholders and C-suite executives are trying to squeeze out as much profit as they can. Their boom leads to bust for the rest of us.
Actually the bottom 50% have seen the most wage growth.
I call bullshit. That is not what anyone sees.
Data doesn’t lie.
I think one problem with the “vibes” everyone is giving here is that most people aren’t as poor as they think they are. I suspect a lot of people on this site would not believe that one third of American households make less than $50,000 a year, and 8% of American households make less than $15,000 a year.. If you’re making $80k and struggling, it can be tough to hear that “the poor” are doing better because you think you are one of the poor.
I appreciate a data supported argument, and love that you actually linked sources.
One thing that I feel is missing in most of the linked analyses is that inflation has also hit unevenly, and the price of basic goods has increased significantly more than overall inflation. Which would explain why households still have less disposable income, also the mean debt burden is much higher leading to loan costs being more common.
Blame AI and share prices.
They overhired during the pandemic adding to already bloated teams which could be made cost efficient during low prime-rate times. The tech job market is correcting back to proper levels. Schools and programs churning out new tech workers are contributing to this massively over populated job space.
