Another variable to consider: the 2020 - 2022 market was rewarding growth (as opposed to profitability or being cash-flow positive). The Corporate loan interest rate was practically 0%. Companies which could show growth, even at the expense of lighting cash on fire, were rewarded as far as the stock market is concerned. CEOs are expected to bias towards shareholder value, lest they be replaced by someone who will. And so, with these variables in play, many took the decision to rapidly expand their operations (costs) in any way that produced marginal growth. They lived and died by their ability to, on each quarterly earnings call, share the message of QoQ and YoY growth. For many companies this required rapid hiring.
The market now is demanding flesh and CEOs are either expected to provide it, or else get fired. Just like in the former time period, they would get fired had they not shown growth. I personally do not think a CEO should be fired now for having to hire employees, when they would have been fired in the first place had they not rapidly hired.
Agreed. While much criticism gets directed to the leadership for irresponsible hiring and operations, the market dynamics of today which are motivating businesses to cut costs, were at an earlier time motivating businesses to rapidly grow and expand. Company executives who do not satisfy the market are quickly exited.
I see it differently. i think the playbook is that the system generates a counterculture to control the opposition narrative. The systems greatest trick as Ted K put it.
Sure, the hippie movement was branded countercultural. But to what purpose? Note that during the period, the US government was engaged in a large scale remaking of America both domestically and internationally. Domestically, we saw the remaking of immigration policies to no longer bias towards those of European descent, and instead towards what favored macro capitalism (the import of cheaper and low skilled labor). Internationally the US was scaling up engagement in hot and cold wars and no longer considering itself bound to the constitutional provisions for war. Lo and behold, during this period, a "counterculture" arises which glorifies drug use, the dissolution of the nuclear family and pushes forward the vapid strain of hyper individualism that we see today. Suddenly the anti-war movement is associated with drug use and degeneracy, whilst the nation's racial consciousness is broken in time to welcome a new wave of immigrants to help improve the margins of big business.
Note that the current "woke" counterculture follows the same pattern. Increased individualism, sublimated racial awareness, dissolution of family, and rampant degeneracy. Meanwhile the state continues its hegemonic march of constant international agitation.
This gets racist and/or homophobic enough at the end to be almost flag-worthy, but I'm going to respond to part of it.
I don't know where you get the idea of "increased individualism" from "woke culture". Racial justice advocates and queer leaders often talk about community and the importance of banding together - so much so that opponents have taken to branding that as things like "communism" or "black supremacy".
As for "dissolution of family", that's an anti-queer talking point; the nuclear family is not the only form of family. "Rampant degeneracy" is just a values disagreement but framed in terms of good and evil.
Disagree. I think your social status has more to do with your conformity to neoliberal values than it does money. Sure, money can buy nice things and attract friends. Just look at Kanye.
Another hard agree. I always get a good laugh when people in queer culture claim to be living a counter culture lifestyle. Meanwhile the US state department is flying the queer flag at its embassies around the world and using it to agitate foreign conservative cultures.
I nominate being an unapologetic white male as the counter culture of our current time. Just watch how many downvotes you'll get on any social media platform for having this position.
It's not that it's an unpopular position, it's that the argument is flawed and the point you're trying to make falls flat. First, you lump all of queer culture into one group, a false categorization without which your augment fails. Second, you assert that being in the overwhelmingly dominant racial group, the overwhelmingly dominant sexual orientation and the undeniably dominant gender should somehow be interpreted at "counterculture" even though the group that fits that definition is numerically larger, wealthier, and politically empowered than any other group.
So if you get downvotes, it may be because you made a bad argument, not just because you come off as having an axe to grind.
> First, you lump all of queer culture into one group, a false categorization without which your augment fails.
In fact, I do lump them onto one group. Many subgroups inside a group. You know who I am referring to when I say queer culture. The group exists, it isn't false. Colors keep getting added to the flag. Rather than engage with reality you prefer to have useless rhetorical debates. Let's move past that.
>Second, you assert that being in the overwhelmingly dominant racial group, the overwhelmingly dominant sexual orientation and the undeniably dominant gender should somehow be interpreted at "counterculture" even though the group that fits that definition is numerically larger, wealthier, and politically empowered than any other group.
Culture is often not aligned with majority opinions, majority positions or majority orientations. The culture of the 60s was hippies. Most people were not hippies. Your premise is false here that culture is the same as majority, or political empowerment.
I guess I just have the view that if I am turning on the radio, the TV, watching a movie, a tv show, celebrity voices, the state department, etc - and I am seeing the counterculture, then I am actually just seeing the culture.
Seeing a government body virtue-signal by putting up a flag is not the same as the actual lives that queer people live, which varies WILDLY from the norm thus making it counter cultural.
In fact, many queer people force themselves out of the community by living within the norm to feel more acceptance from the majority (counter-counter culture).
Your perception is also very obviously specific to where you live on this planet.
> Seeing a government body virtue-signal by putting up a flag is not the same as the actual lives that queer people live
The same thing goes for anything that could be described as "queer culture". Plenty of queer people have, and want, nothing to do with the groups and spaces that present themselves as "the community".
A given queer person's level of identification with the broader community is of no relevance to the question of whether the broader culture of the community is countercultural. When the culture itself is used as a political tool by a state actor, I no longer classify the culture as countercultural. Rather, I see it as a weaponized mechanism of cultural subversion.
Sure, the hippie movement was branded countercultural. But to what purpose? Note that during the period, the US government was engaged in a large scale remaking of America both domestically and internationally. Domestically, we saw the remaking of immigration policies to no longer bias towards those of European descent, and instead towards what favored macro capitalism (the import of cheaper and low skilled labor). Internationally the US was scaling up engagement in hot and cold wars and no longer considering itself bound to the constitutional provisions for war. Low and behold, during this period, a "counterculture" arises which glorifies drug use, the dissolution of the nuclear family and pushes forward the vapid strain of hyper individualism that we see today. Suddenly the anti-war movement is associated with drug use and degeneracy, whilst the nation's racial consciousness is broken in time to welcome a new wave of immigrants to help improve the margins of big business.
Note that the current "woke" counterculture follows the same pattern. Increased individualism, sublimated racial awareness, dissolution of family, and rampant degeneracy. Meanwhile the state continues its hegemonic march of constant international agitation.
You most certainly were not seeing hippies endorsed by the state department in the 60s. (Though, that we look back on the hippies of the 60s fondly does say something about the direction we've charted since then.)
There is no "mainstream" culture anymore to counter. Everyone is living in their own little cultural bubble that they believe to be a counterculture to a non-existent mainstream culture.
The hysterical thing is the OP said what they said exactly because everyone knows someone would respond with your exact rhetorical devices like an automaton or a bot.
> Second, you assert that being in the overwhelmingly dominant racial group, the overwhelmingly dominant sexual orientation and the undeniably dominant gender should somehow be interpreted at "counterculture" even though the group that fits that definition is numerically larger, wealthier, and politically empowered than any other group.
And yet, it's remarkably unpopular to announce the simple truism that "white lives matter", or that "it's ok to be white", and our top universities interrogate "whiteness" as problematic, so evidently much further nuance is required between numerical size and cultural sway.
If minority groups are "in charge", why is most of the wealth, corporate power and political power in the hands of majority groups?
Obviously cultural norms change over time, and many ideas that were once fringe are now mainstream. But that doesn't mean that the majority white, straight, Christian(ish) majority in America doesn't still wield most of the power.
Cultural power is different from political and capital power. The influence of an musician, a political candidate, and a wealthy CEO can all be different in their scope, message, and the audience that they reach.
The WASPy power structure is still dominant in the corporate landscape and disproportionately high in the political one. But it has been losing ground on the cultural front for a while now.
There's a reason WASPy individuals complain about "the culture war" - it's the one they are losing. The slogan, "get woke, go broke" suggests they have started losing ground on the corporate front as well.
If you are unsure of what he meant, try and explicitly advocate for "majority white, straight, Christian(ish)" people in the same way every other group gets to do in america and see how it goes. And if your knee jerk reaction is to say "well only a racist white nationalist would do that", you have proved my point, and you are using the same fallacious reasoning that leads to people thinking that all gay rights advocates are pedophiles or all criminal justice reform advocates are thugs.
Advocating for those in power doesn't carry the same reasoning as advocating for those who are not in power so it is not the same type of fallacious reasoning you claim.
Edit: I removed my second sentence since it appears to be confusing others of my tone and intention.
>Advocating for those in power doesn't carry the same reasoning as advocating for those who are not in power
Anybody could be in power at any given time. If your argument for why your group should be in power depends on who is currently in power then it isn’t valid because it stops being true as soon as you win. No idea what you are saying about stupid people.
> my argument [“Advocating for those in power”] has nothing to do with who should be in power
Saying what kinds of arguments are acceptable in support of the group in power has a lot to do with who should be in power.
I'll say it again since you edited your previous message to reply to the message following it, I wasn't arguing about who should be in power, or placing my chips in any direction. I was plainly stating that people will have different reasons for supporting the class in power vs supporting outside of that class.
Parent comment was stating that people who support the minority are using the same fallacious reasoning those who support the majority do and that is not true.
In the event the power changes, the people who supported the previous majority class might be the same or use the same reasoning but that has nothing to do with how both groups reason separately.
As an example, imagine it's The Great Depression, The Majority would say something like "Wow I really wish we had more food, I'm going to vote for this candidate who says that we'll get more food". In this instance the Majority is not tied to the ruling class, do you see how implying everyone is knee-jerk reacting is misleading?
>If minority groups are "in charge", why is most of the wealth, corporate power and political power in the hands of majority groups?
Because there is no one majority group. The only way you get a majority group is by drawing dumb lines around non-adjacent cultural groups because they happen to be of the same economic means or vote the same way.
> ... mean that the majority white, straight, Christian(ish) majority in America doesn't still wield most of the power.
yeah, except for finance, media, academia and politics. I do agree that straight white christian(ish) males do wield the most power in the other intuitions that matter (thought I'm drawing a blank on which those might be).
Case in point—-Name one recent president that didn’t need go pander to christians to get elected. I’ve always found this tiring being a non-christian myself. Christians are not oppressed no matter what the terminally online right-wing on HN seems to think.
I have never heard a republican say something positive about white people. Can you give me an example? For the amount of dog whistling the GOP has done over the years the complete dearth of any explicit pandering to white Americans is actually shocking and deserving of a proper explanation.
Great explanation. Very proper. Much explanation. Thanks for the example /s
Arguments you cant argue against are not a “dishonest script” what does that even mean? Just give an example of what you say Republicans do a good job of.
You are being dishonest because examples of the GOP pandering to white voters are well-documented and easily accessible. Either you never looked, in which case arguing at all is dishonest since you don't know what you're talking about, or you looked and ignored the mountain of evidence denying your view. The "script" part is likely about you shifting the goalposts. Why doesn't dog-whistling count as explicit pandering to white Americans? That isn't to say the GOP are always subtle, either. All in all, it seems pretty clear you're sealioning.
For the benefit of other readers though, I'll bite.
For instance, former congressman for Iowa Steve King tweeting about slavery [0] is pretty explicit. How about the slightly more abstruse but still pretty glaring white supremacist dog whistle [1] in response to a random Dutch guy complaining about muslims. He was in congress 2003-2021.
Of course Great Replacement rhetoric is also pushed pretty openly to rally white voters, with Tucker Carlson saying things like "demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party’s political ambitions", and congresswoman for New York Elise Stefanik running ads saying "[Democrats'] plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington".
Do you accept these examples or do you need the GOP leadership to issue a letter signed by all party members stating they like white people?
> Why doesn't dog-whistling count as explicit pandering to white Americans?
Because why do they have to dog whistle about it? Why do they have to resort to subtlety at all?
It's forbidden from public discourse to such an extent that can only be found between the lines, hidden in vague allusions, or more likely, asserted as baseless accusations slandering conservative politicians, while the GOP explicitly tries everything it can to promote their non-white figures.
If you read the examples I gave above, they're not vague. Dog-whistles are more for plausible deniability than subtlety, and it's because (shocker) white supremacy is frowned upon. If you think liking white people requires openly advocating white supremacy, and anything else is an implicit statement that you don't like white people, then that really says more about you than anything else.
They try to promote their non-white figures because their agenda and campaigning for the most part is so overwhelmingly targeted toward white voters that they have horrible reach into other demographics.
This is like the Black Lives Matter vs All Lives Matter debacle. Minorities are brought into the spotlight because there are systems and large groups of people actively working against them. Meanwhile, you don't need to "promote" whiteness, because that's seen as the default in America.
But why? If this is really the majority sentiment, why on earth leave any room for plausible deniability?
> their agenda and campaigning for the most part is so overwhelmingly targeted toward white voters that they have horrible reach into other demographics.
Not really, though. Voting levels are low enough that they could conceivably focus their energies simply on getting more non-voting whites to vote.
> But why? If this is really the majority sentiment, why on earth leave any room for plausible deniability?
If you read the comment you're replying to, it answers that question immediately.
> Not really, though. Voting levels are low enough that they could conceivably focus their energies simply on getting more non-voting whites to vote.
They could, but their agenda fits white people better, for reasons that are evident to anyone with critical thinking skills. Hint: think about the dog-whistling some more.
> Culture is not required to take subterfuge in dog whistles. Only counterculture is.
> Culture is what's uncontroversially and fearlessly blasted on front pages, and on mainstream TV.
My comments on dog-whistling were specifically targeted toward the one commenter talking about how politicians don't seem to care about white people.
If you want to go back to the broader discussion, on culture, then yes I agree. And what is blasted on front pages and mainstream TV is overwhelmingly white, with tiny pockets dedicated to other groups. To say that "whiteness" is a counterculture is absurd.
As an aside:
> the millions of white Democrats
The Democrat agenda also fits white people better than non-white people, though they make more effort than Republicans to acknowledge minorities.
As for why non-white Republicans vote that way, maybe they miss the dog-whistles, or maybe they think the racism of the party isn't directed at them (e.g., since they're "one of the good ones") or that it's outweighed by other factors (i.e., they hate taxes), or maybe they think the Republicans are the better of two evils. Not really relevant, since they aren't in this discussion. Do you have the critical thinking skills?
No, I’m not engaging with the dishonest script you’re trying to run me through, and looking at your short post history it’s obvious what you’re trying to do. Have a nice day.
lasftr: those are examples of dog whistles. They dont use the word “white” anywhere. The GOP has dog whistled for decades and the whole point of a dog whistle is that it DOESN’T explicitly pander to white people. Dog whistles are IMPLICIT by definition. I hope that clears up what I was saying. Thanks for trying to provide an answer my question: “Why do you think politicians never explicitly pander to white people?“
Edit: Not needing to do something is not a reason for not doing it. Do you have a hypothesis for why they wouldn't explicitly pander? It seems you adamantly refuse to address this monumental question.
Ok fine, here's my answer then: they don't need to, because their voters know the GOP doesn't work against white people. I suspect it's different from your answer.
But they explicitly don’t wield that power as a group and attack people who suggest that they do. Powerful white men are all liberals who defer to the group interests of minorities and attack the group interest of the majority.
Yeah this is all making me wonder why we're looking for a singular dominant culture to which there are one or more counter-cultures.
Pretty sure one of the canonized characteristics of post-modernity (or the post-cold war era if you dont like pretentious art terms) is pluralism.
This spicy thread seems to reinforce the feeling that the dominant culture has (and maybe always was) some horrifying unknowable ever-changing organic mass of competing counter-cultures.
Paraphrasing some dead social philosopher, history and cultures aren't bedtime stories or cartoon characters and we create dangerous false narratives, policies and hierarchies when we indulge the impulse to reduce them into these.
Really confused by this statement. I think queer culture can be countercultural depending. For example legislation is currently up in some states to ban dressing in a way outside your sex because drag queens exist, but even though drag queens have a tv show and a movie and stuff I'm sure it'll also probably scoop a butch lesbian or two or just a regular tomboy woman.
Legal status is terrible standard for whether something is counter culture. Outlawing something is neither necessary nor sufficient to be counterculture. Some legal and cultural boundaries overlap, some are orthogonal.
There are a great many subcultures that would like legal boundaries shifted, and when they care enough they become interest groups participating in the democratic process.
Even the blandest bland blandy that ever blanded is not going to agree with all the laws and societal boundaries being set exactly the way they are. Either that means there's no such thing as a mainstream culture, or we have to understand noisy clashes between subcultures don't make one or the other a counter culture.
I think the way we're discussing that something obviously SUBculture is being confused for a COUNTERculture is an argument in OPs favor that we don't have much (highly visible) counterculture right now.
Subculture vs counterculture makes sense. I'd be curious what counterculture is and how it differentiates from subculture then, if we're not going to measure if institutions exist that are actively trying to outlaw a culture.
A subculture is generally hidden from the mainstream culture. Few are those who display their BDSM subculture in obvious public fashion.
A counterculture is in the face of the mainstream culture, trying to change the cult. It is countering the mainstream. It is activist or, at the least, unabashed with the intention of normalization.
To expand on this, in a democracy-ish country law pretty much ALWAYS lags the cultural reality because legislatures basically never speculatively do things when it comes to cultural issues, they wait for enough people to want something for it to be an issue worth of the political platform. You might get some extremists pushing the envelope by catering to an extreme minority but even then they won't really be far out in front of the pack.
I mean I'm talking about current laws on proposal to ban people from dressing differently without saying "only drag queens". The letter of the law bans butch lesbians and tomboys. These are adults.
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It might get downvotes because you've just said it in a very ridiculous way that indicates you're angry about it.
I think there's a valid point lurking there, but you botched it. Surely you appreciate that multiple things can be true at the same time, and there are numerous ways that white men have advantages still.
Why is it okay for one side to be angry, but not the other? This is such a commonly used accusation to deflate someone else's point. Making them seem emotional, and therefore illogical.
FWIW, I don't think the person you're replying to looks even a little bit angry in that post. The point of view seems well considered.
I think the anger is coming out in over the top descriptions of white males as targets of some kind of cultural conspiracy, or talking about laughing at queer folk because they're not persecuted like unapologetic straight white men ... Those are some pretty odd conclusions that he seems to have wandered into emotionally, and it's hard to think there isn't some hostility there, otherwise why bother saying all this?
If you think he sounds neutral, unaffected, rational, I wonder if it's just that you already agree with him.
Your whole argument is based on the premise that statements made in anger cannot be true. And the focus on emotional state is typical ad hominem attack. You did not refute the content in any way.
In order to put white men in their place, they must understand that their opinion doesn't matter because they are white men. They cannot know adversity, they cannot have any opinion on minority issues. Therefore, if you want to participate in a discussion today your best bet is to try not to appear obviously white or male, and if you must concede that fact you ought to apologize for having an opinion in the first place, since nobody asked for it.
Being an unapologetic white male would imply that you felt like you could give your opinion freely without having someone immediately attack it as invalid because of your race and gender.
But I guarantee that every time a term like this gets used, the replies will imply that anyone identifying as an unapologetic white male is in fact racist.
It's a great demonstration of how the counter culture has in fact become culture. Anybody who really doubts this probably doesn't have kids or spend much time around younger adults.
This is geographic and doesn't address any of the specific demographic claims made, much less the assertion that those who hold power are "unapologetically white."
>Meanwhile the US state department is flying the queer flag at its embassies around the world and using it to agitate foreign conservative cultures.
Oh come on, that is not their main goal. Its all a scam to cover up things like unchecked military spending/war, unchecked government corruption at the corporate level among many other things.
There is a reason why this meme continues to float around the web.
> Any individual website which opts in will get more clicks with ChatGPT than without.
Not necessarily, especially if ChatGPT makes the user no longer need to even visit the website in order to get the content. Remember, google drives visits. ChatGPT aims to provide the answer.
I think there is a > 50% chance that Microsoft and OpenAI throwing a bunch of incredibly bright researchers at the problem can figure out how to do proper attribution.
Who benefitted from the mass hirings? Stock holders, and also workers. Did the workers complain when the job market (esp in tech) was on fire and wages were increasing? No. Did they blame the people at the top for their new job and wages? No.
But, now they want to blame leaders when there are mass layoffs. I think the blame is misplaced. The root cause was the stock market, and better yet blame the fed. The incentive was to show growth at all costs, even at the expense of burning cash. Leaders who did not optimize to growth were fired in many cases. But the game changed when stimulus and endless money printing stopped.
All of these companies laying people off are claiming that they "over hired" or "over extended" themselves during the pandemic and now they need to tighten their belts.
Who made the decision to hire more workers than the company needed? Leadership. Who made the decisions to put the company in a position where it would need to lay people off? Leadership.
Who bears the consequences of those decisions? It's not the people who made them.
It's not like the workers forced the companies to hire them.
This is the problem I have with these layoffs. The leadership who made the strategic decisions that put the company in a position to need to lay people off should face significant economic consequences before anyone else. But that is not happening. That never happens.
And this also is where I push back on people who say that investors are the ones taking the risk (and should therefor reap the rewards of business). It's the workers who take a greater risk - because they have less information, less power, and less of a buffer if something goes wrong.
> people who say that investors are the ones taking the risk
Those same people will tell you how the "free money era" is over. Take a look a labors share of the economy, if capitals share is so large due to capital risk, and capital is easier to get, why didn't investors share of the pie shrink?
Another point that is missed, is that many of these tech companies are now still net positive when comparing new headcount added during pandemic VS the 2013 layoffs.
You can see the data here for MSFT, Google, Amazon, Meta and Spotify. Yes, other companies did not exhibit the same pattern, but the point remains.
A working agreement is a contract between two parties.
Who made the decision to join a company that was seeing sudden, unsustainable growth ? Workers. Who made the decisions to place themselves in a position they maybe aren't that needed? Workers.
Who enjoyed significant salary increase due to higher demand for their skills, increasing the cost of their labours while asking for increased benefits such as flexibility, work from home, etc ? Again; workers
No there are not. There's a massive information imbalance. Most companies do not make enough information public for workers to truly assess whether their growth is sustainable or not. Public companies have to file a certain amount of financial information, but they are very good at playing games with that information to mask their true financial health.
Workers have no choice when it comes to positions where they might not be needed. That could be true of literally any job someone might take. And workers pretty much never have the information to accurately assess for themselves whether or not they think they are needed until they are in the job. Every job a worker takes is a risk in which they are asked to trust the company hiring them not to turn around and immediately fire them.
> Who enjoyed significant salary increase due to higher demand for their skills, increasing the cost of their labours while asking for increased benefits such as flexibility, work from home, etc ? Again; workers
Work from home and flexibility are mutually beneficial. Knowledge workers perform better when they are able to do their work in the way that best fits them. This is not some benefit the company pays to hand out, it's the company structuring itself in a way that most benefits it.
As for salary, tech workers are still underpaid. Tech work is not factory work. The companies revenues are entirely generated by the knowledge, skills, and work of the workers. There's no physical machine the company is adding that allows the workers to do their work which they couldn't themselves easily acquire. The very fact that profit exists in tech companies tells you that workers are being underpaid.
The only thing capital brings to the table in a tech company is the ability to operate in the negative - to scale head count (and thus to some degree productivity) faster than revenue. That is not something any tech worker needs, and most tech companies almost certainly could have grown far more sustainably by growing along with their revenue. That is something capital pushes, hoping for outsized returns on the grown on its investment.
So, again, who should be suffering the consequences when the economy turns down? Keep in mind, paper losses of a falling stock market are not true losses for investors. As long as they hold through the fall - assuming the company doesn't go under completely - they'll most likely recover everything and more, but losing a job and therefor income can be life changing for a worker.
I think there's probably a few things here that are worth a comment:
- Information imbalance: from people I've talked to in decently senior roles at even very large companies, it might be surprising to learn that information can be poor at every level, because generally the people who are responsible for hiring at even fairly senior levels are not directly also responsible for expenditure, especially when macro-economic conditions are responsible for those financial decision. Essentially, the person who is responsible for setting the hiring targets to enable 20% growth is likely not responsible for modelling what happens if the cost of short term debt goes from 2% to 10%. Probably this is most likely in the superscalers, and it's likely hardest in the companies from 2-5k people - with a tech org of about 1k, you're likely acutely aware of the impact hiring strong people can have on your product while lacking the numbers to approach the problem analytically and with a sophisticated finance org. Basically, the number of people who could reasonably be expected to consider 'if we hire too many people, we'll have to fire them' as a significant part of their brief is smaller than you might think.
- 'There's no physical machine the company is adding that allows the workers to do their job which they couldn't themselves easily acquire'. Ignoring the focus on the physical machine bit and focusing more on the creative part of 'what does the company add, what do the people add', your claim may be true in some parts of industry and if you're in that side of industry I lament your situation, but for large parts of industry it's unequivocally false. There's a huge amount of value add that the machinery of an engineering organisation adds. In the more creative spaces, anyone who's operated in a truly high performing culture will have observed that a lot of the culture of building comes from the grouping of people who've been very, very carefully hired for, who've been carefully placed on team together, where memetic techniques have been used to proliferate certain positive behaviours, raising people up. We succeed as a team and fail as a team. You can see this over and over in so many testimonials - the stories from those who worked at Xerox PARC, stories from the MIT LISP hackers, back 50 years, all the way through hearing about the work the M1 team was doing, seeing the companies that spawn hundreds of startups from their alumni. And that's not to talk about the companies who specifically use process and ritual to ensure that engineers are consistently at the bar across massive orgs, from Google's exacting bars for code quality all the way to the consulting arms of Oracle, CapGemini etc who can approach repeated problems and get the most out of their engineers in a space where it's arguably harder to hire talent. And this is totally forgetting the huge non-SWE parts of orgs required to enable success - sales, finance, marketing, etc etc.
- Tech workers are still underpaid - think there'll be a rude awakening coming for you I guess. People across the world get paid based on how much they can get in the market (and if you're already at the company, the switching cost). There's room for places that do it differently, but not much room. If a large number of qualified people join the labour pool, you can bet that the practical market comp goes down.
- Paper losses are not true losses and you can just wait for the price to go back up: Honestly, that's wrong on like every level. Firstly, at the company level, there's a very real risk for many of these companies that they go bankrupt. Spotify has something like $2.8B in cash equivalents, has revenue of $9B and expenditure of about $9B. If their revenue dips by 20% due to e.g. a global recession, that cash supply will last them about 18 months. Before they get there, they have to raise more money. If raising via equity, they're going to be raising at their new and lower valuation, so their investors take a huge haircut. If they raise via debt, they'll be getting charged a lot on interest (because their risk of default is nontrivial). My brief but non-zero insider knowledge of some of these debt deals make it very much sound like a sellers market. A smaller company might expect to see 15% interest demanded - if you need $150M, you're in trouble. The staff who Spotify are dropping today likely represent $300M over that same 18 month period. You can bet that they'll be making this cut after scraping the barrel everywhere else.
Now, for the actual investors - if you take a massive paper loss, you're basically not getting that money back on a reasonable timeframe. https://danluu.com/norstad/risk-time/ is a good article on this topic. The simple way to think about it is that if in the good years you get 4% a year ROI across your portfolio and then you take a 50% haircut once, it will take you 18 years to make that difference back. The people who invest in tech companies are in large part not rich billionaires looking to pay for their next yacht - they're institutional investors, mutuals, pension funds who are looking to maximise returns for their members.
I appreciate your reasoned and detailed response. I disagree with you and I'll take it point by point. In some cases I think the disagreement is based more in a [reasonable] misunderstanding of the point I'm actually making, or where I didn't make my point as clearly as I should have.
> Information imbalance
I have been that Director level manager responsible for scaling and hiring with out the full scope of information. When I said "people responsible" I mean, the people with the information. And yes, it is a smaller pool than many people might thing. But it is also a much more highly compensated pool. Those are the people who are ultimately responsible, and the people who should face consequences and accountability. I would include the investors (at the very least those who sit on the board and take an active role in the running of the organization) in that pool.
> There's no physical machine the company is adding
Here I fumbled my words. I should have said "capital" or the "investors". Yes, absolutely, the organization itself provides value. But that organization is almost entirely composed of workers and could be run entirely by the workers with out capital. Traditionally, in a factory setting, the value capital has been said to provide - and the reasoning for capital taking the returns - is the physical machinery necessary for workers to do their work. In a tech company, there is no such machinery.
The organization of a tech company is entirely composed of, and run by, workers. In the vast majority of cases, they don't need any physical machinery to do their work except for consumer grade electronics they probably already own or could trivially acquire. In the case of a fully distributed company, this is even more true.
NOTE: I am including management in the workers here. I'm using workers, as it is used in the context of worker cooperatives or employee owned business, as a synonym of employees. This is different from the traditional union or labor organizing context which separates "line workers" from "managers".
> Tech workers are still underpaid
In a traditional capitalist labor market, I think you can reasonably make this argument. This views workers as replaceable cogs and looks at how cheaply they could be purchased on the market.
But I'm looking at it from the perspective of "what does it actually take to produce the value the company produces". And all it takes is the workers time, skills, and knowledge. As I made in other points, capital brings very little to the table. In that case, the workers produce the entire value of the company. And from that perspective, many workers at tech companies (which, remember, I'm using as a synonym for "employee" here) are still compensated less than the value they create. In some cases by significant amounts.
> Paper losses are not true losses and you can just wait for the price to go back up
I'll grant you the wait for them to go back up point. That was a bit glib and not well formed, but also somewhat tangential to my larger point which I didn't make very clearly: which is that while those losses might hurt on paper if they represent wealth that is on paper then they have no immediate economic impact on the person losing it. There's no risk of hunger from a paper loss. No risk of homelessness. No risk of exposure to the elements.
And I will grant you, yes, there are some investors who do expose themselves that much with their investments. But they are a tiny outlier. For the vast majority of investors, their investment is surplus far above and beyond what they need to live a comfortable life to a reasonable standard of living. In other words, they can afford to lose it while suffering no unreasonable impact to their quality of life. (Note, I would consider going from "can afford a private yatch" to "have to live an upper middle class life" a reasonable impact.")
To your point about institutional investors, the vast majority of those assets (80 - 90%) are owned by the top 10%. Who are, by definition, the middle upper class and above. They are perfectly comfortable. And they can afford a loss.
My larger point is about the risk actually being taken - not in terms of paper wealth - but in terms of real impact on quality of life. Investors aren't taking much. Workers are.
These details are not often not apparent to workers, and many times the folks doing the hiring actively hide this kind of thing from applicants. So it is not the workers fault.
Recruiters have reached out to you from two different companies. Company A and Company B are both offering compensation greater than you're currently making (which is almost always true for most workers), and you ask questions about the viability of the company (hugely profitable) and the job (very much needed).
On what basis are you to know that despite being hugely profitable, Company A is going to get rid of 28,000 employees, while Company B is instead going to cut CEO compensation by 40%? How can you be sure whether you're joining Alphabet or Apple?
There is nobody to blame for any of this but the leadership making poor decisions for which they won't face any consequences.
> Company A is going to get rid of 28,000 employees, while Company B is instead going to cut CEO compensation by 40%? How can you be sure whether you're joining Alphabet or Apple?
As a recently ex-alphabet employee: apple never went on a hiring spree.
They had restraint the last few years, with a significantly smaller workforce, and the result is (hopefully) no layoffs.
Fast money moves quickly and it might move away from you.
We should also be talking about Yelp at the start of the pandemic, who was predictably in a precarious situation. They offered to employ people part time (and still do) instead of mass layoffs. You can work as an SDE at 80% time instead, which gives you a stable (but smaller) income in a scary time, and it gives the employer a discount to save without layoffs.
Personally, I would take 80% or maybe even 60% time at my old Google job over a layoff. Everyone comments about “rest and vest” anyways, so 75% may be perceived as appropriate anyways.
I'm sorry for you losing your job, since it sounds like it wasn't voluntary.
I understand why Apple hasn't done mass layoffs, but I'm still stuck on how you know that during the recruiting process. If Apple tries to hire you in January 2020, how do you know they are going to be more circumspect about hiring over the next three years? Apple hired a large number of people during the last three years, just as Google did. NOW we know it was a MUCH SMALLER "large number of people," but it was still quite a few. If you're talking to recruiters from each, how do you know?
I don't blame anyone for taking a job with Amazon, Google, or Facebook. I mean, I wouldn't personally work for any of the three for my own reasons, but I don't think it's fair to blame people taking jobs there for their own layoffs.
> I understand why Apple hasn't done mass layoffs, but I'm still stuck on how you know that during the recruiting process.
You can't truly know. But you can vaguely see how many employees there are from news/earnings reports/etc. There's a lot of data in the moment, but you can never know how to process it until after-the-fact.
That said, it may not matter. Like you said, you can't blame anyone for taking a job, and they pay well, and part of that money is "boom/bust" cycles. Its part of the industry IMO.
I've been thinking about this question as well. Is it better to have not given these people a job at all rather than to have given a job and then fired? I don't know. There are a lot of ways to look at it that all could be right.
It wasn't over-hiring given the environment at the time. It was over hiring given current environment. It seems clear that companies who took a more conservative approach to hiring have come out better for it. Not all companies could be so lucky. Some had activist investors who aggressively pushed for growth or else pushed out leaders. Messy world we live in.
> Most companies employ a board of narcissists that only care about themselves and their wallet
My read is a bit different, in that the board optimizes to the stock price above all, which yes they benefit from but that just means their personal interests are in alignment with the interests of stock holders. I do not blame the leaders so much as I blame the model. Leaders who do not optimize the stock price are quickly expelled. When the stock market was flush with covid stimulus cash, and even before that whilst the market was hot, the name of the game was showing growth. Companies were incentivized to show growth even at the cost of burning cash. Companies took on massive debt and in many cases, either did stock buybacks and/or hired rapidly in an effort to scale their organization for growth. When the market fundamentals changed, and money started swinging back towards safer bets (cash flow positive companies), suddenly the game had changed and leaders needed to react accordingly.
I think you can dislike the behaviors being exhibited and the game simultaneously. I hear you, it's the reality of the situation we live in now, but it's not a good system for the vast majority of people.
Disagree in the sense that politicians, even when receiving the majority of their donations from small donor citizens, still end up beholden to major non-citizen interests. In fact, I see this development as a kind of optimization the system took. Large institutional interests figured out they can save money and motivate private citizens to fund the puppet politician's campaigns.
The market now is demanding flesh and CEOs are either expected to provide it, or else get fired. Just like in the former time period, they would get fired had they not shown growth. I personally do not think a CEO should be fired now for having to hire employees, when they would have been fired in the first place had they not rapidly hired.