Every time I hear news from the tech industry lately

Hey this has been happening at my work! It definitely isn't a complete dumpster fire over here now, that knowledge and experience from those hundreds of people wasn't critical or anything, the people who are left are totally working well and not just scraping by under constant fear of being fired next, it's fine

They always underestimate the morale killer. They think HR sending out a few notes will smooth things over. Nope, that job security just hit the floor, people are scared. Productivity drops while everyone processes, people start wondering if they should look elsewhere, it takes years to rebuild from a big layoff like that
- My (soon to be ex) company gets around the rebuild step by doing annual layoffs.
- they are so clueless. half of my team got laid off on friday, and we got an email from our manager inviting us to attend a different team's standup in addition to our own so we could feel more "connected".
  
  the only thing another standup is going to make me feel is fucking pissed off
- My employer had a slightly better reason to do layoffs, because our financial situation then was pretty bad and still is pretty bad. I don't mean "we got 30% profit instead of 31%!", but "we aren't making money and we have no money". Layoffs were more understandable than usual given the situation and circumstances.
  
  And even in these conditions, I still think it was a terrible decision. Morale was ultra low after the layoffs, and the situation led to quite a few people who did survive to leave of their own volition for better opportunities. We lost talent in the layoffs, and then we lost talent in everyone who felt like they were on a sinking ship. Which, in turn, has led to even more people feeling like it's a sinking ship with the writing on the wall.
  
  My management chain is completely gone. I directly report to an executive now, where previously there was my supervisor, his supervisor, his supervisor, and then the executive. Where there were perhaps 10-15 system engineers both in and outside my team, there are now like 3-4 of us thanks to layoffs and departures. And if one of these guys leave, I'm going to find a new job and put in my two weeks once I land one.
  
  The silver lining is that my job security has never been better, because they've created a situation where they literally can't afford to lose me or my colleagues. We're all on critical projects, and at the point where a new person just wouldn't be helpful, because they don't have the proper time to learn and get caught up before we need these projects finished.
  
  In short? Layoffs are a terrible decision, even when you're in terrible financial straits. You risk a death spiral that makes things even worse and worse.
- I always jump ship after a layoff. They invariably ask you to do more work for the same price. Half the time at places I've worked the company goes under soon anyways.
  
  You get a bigger raise with a new job than staying at the old job, and I assume it's even worse after layoffs. When I tell job interviewers "because layoffs", they can easily verify it and confirm I didn't just get fired for being an asshole.
- What happened at my work was they did like 2 mini layoffs, then a medium one, then a big one that was split into 3 parts, all this over the course of about two years. Morale here is more or less in free fall, we've alienated our user base, and I don't expect it to recover for many years.
My company built a big lab with expensive equipment and then laid off the person who was an expert in using all of it.
- I'm sure that won't have any negative consequence. Please do not question the decisions of our enlightened leaders or you won't have pizza.
I work in an industry where it's kind of normal to have large fluctuations. Layoffs at least go by seniority, so only new people are terrified.

I honestly feel you shouldn't be able to declare money saved from layoffs as a good thing, shouldn't profit be a sign of growth but if you really could keep growing you'd still need that staff

It's not a good thing if you know what you're looking at. Of course, the average investor doesn't have a clue. Half the problem is that there's a lot that can't be conveyed in financial statements. I've worked for companies that I would never buy any stock in because it's like you get there and realize that they completely destroyed any chance at long term viability for some small short term gains. Even if they're profitable. Corporations that focus on building a high quality, sustainable business that aims to earn a modest profit are an exceptionally rare breed.

You certainly won’t have to rehire many of them in a week or two as your operations turn to shit.

Wait till they demand contractor rates!
As long as you don't go full Elon, company can get away with it. You are just coping hard.

Oh yes. The CEO said to my boss that they need to cut down on staff because it costs too much, meanwhile he takes a huge bonus every year. Makes sense...

Then on the other end, you have bosses who willingly took pay cut to save employees from lay offs such as Nintendo bosses Satoru Iwata and Shigeru Miyamoto. They're far and wide among the bloody sea of cut throat and greedy executives.
That kind of insightful advice doesn't come cheap.

My company 😢

This shit sucks. Some Silicon Valley shit company bought ours and they're closing us down after only half a year. Feels so unfair. Our company was doing well while theirs is going down the shitter with huge loans and promising the moon but delivering fuck all. Silicon Valley culture is toxic shit

Typical Private Equity deal... The buyers take a massive loan in the name of the company they are buying then they use the sudden massive interest payments to explain the declining profits and the need to downsize. Then they find a way to squirrel out of the loans claiming the company sucked and let banks take remaining assets (or losses) and maybe resell the intellectual property to someone else right before that.
- So you mean that banks are dumb and give away money for free and then just take the losses and repeat thr process?
- True, but we never expected that to happen with our company which was built on entirely different values. I am now committed never to let those vultures anywhere near a company I care about if I can help it, no matter their offer
Well, this is because it's access to Money that determines power, not actual merit.

That's the purest Capitalism you can think of and you see it at such an extreme level in present day Tech Startup Culture because nowadays it's basically the Even Wilder Wild West Of Finance so it operates by the same principles of Finance - (I actually went from Investment Banking to Startups back in the UK a few years ago and for me it looked a lot like the Founder and Investor level culture of the latter was very similar to that in the wildest bits of the former). Back in the 90s Startups weren't quite like that, but nowadays it's different.

That kind of thing also operates at the people level: I've seen Startups with so-so ideas get jump-started with a couple of millions because mommy and daddy of a main founder are rich whilst ideas with a lot better legs to go places keep limping along unable to generate sufficient cash flow to takeoff or to get enough investment to do what's needed to generate more cash flow, until running out of founds.

What survives is either those with access to lots of no questions asked money upfront (which actually works because a well funded half-arsed idea can still triumph in the market over barelly funded good ideas) or those who manage to portray their stuff as paradygm-changing ("The next Google!!!") which why one sees incredible levels of bullshit in the Startup space and endless jumping on hype-trains (like, for example, anybody looking for funding now will be pitching "something-something-AI !!!")
Imagine how many brilliant innovations have been lost to the world because of this...
- Here's a list from just one major company

Add in re-hiring those same employees at a lower rate or off-shoring to India to get 3x the head count for the same wage and that's basically what's going on.

3x times the headcount 9x times the lead times. Spend more for less!
- Good God Almighty. If I worked on a construction job, you'd see a bunch of people trying to pound screws in with the head of a screwdriver. Meanwhile, I'm over here like, "No! What? What the hell are you doing?!Wait, did you just try to solder too boards together with a blow torch? Oh fuck. Now the building is on fire."
  
  And of course, management is like, "Why is the building on fire?? Isn't this like the twelfth time the building has been on fire?"
  
  Yes. Yes it is, because you geniuses fired all the guys who knew anything about construction and hired a bunch of people who were able to identify screwdrivers without asking them if they knew how to use one.
  
  Now, if we were actually in construction, this would be completely ludicrous. But if you work in technology, it's considered a "good business decision" because it has a "positive impact on the bottom line". ..for about 5 minutes anyway.
- Also 9x the terrible flaws that scare away customers.
  
  Spent about the same for more people to do less work and lower quality work.
  
  Note that 99% of the time the offshore labor geography does have talent, but they aren't going to work for an offshoring shop, they will work for real companies in that geography. The offshoring companies thrive on essentially fraud, no matter what country they are in.

You forgot to add ai to everything.

The problem is that these assholes never regret because there are no consequences.

There are consequences, but those consequences are a big fat bonus and a golden parachute.

Pick the victims randomly

Even better, pick the highest-paid rank-and-file workers (which usually have the highest pay for a reason), so your entire workforce is made up of inexperienced juniors unfamiliar with the things they're working on, who have little to no reason to stay at the company for long. That always works out in the company's favor long-term.

Experiencing this now. They fired my manager/boss, who was the only engineer that had the license to sign off on a bunch of shit related to a bunch of our projects. Now i’m left picking up the pieces and working remotely with some guy hundreds of miles away that doesnt have direct access to our file systems. So fun!
They know that, at least for a little while, the customers are buying the brand name and not evaluating the nuanced ccompetency. When that falls, their stocks have vested and they are long gone.

I immediately distrust anyone wearing a suit, I've just realised.

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

— Maya Angelou

If shareholders and executives are demanding so much money, shouldn't they be the optimal target for cuts to maximize profitability of the business? 🤔

IMHO that's why co-ops tend to last longer.

All employees are replaceable by a series of sales pitches on what AI is about to do right around the corner. That will keep pumping the stock price right up until the impending massive crash.

"The economy is doing fine."

I saw this a few years ago and it has stuck with me.

"The economy isn't talking about me and you, it's referring to corporations and executives and shareholders and such."

The economy could be doing amazing and we have 50% unemployment.

The economy could also be doing terrible and we have 0% unemployment.

The economy could also be doing amazing and the workers don't make enough to survive.

It isn't measuring what many people seem to think it is. It isn't a measure of "how well the average person is doing" at all.
- Exactly. I feel like Andrew Yang gets a bad rep, but it's not like he didn't say stuff that everyone should know. I liked his idea of expanding the "American Scorecard" as he called it. Basically we currently use GDP, and stock prices to determine how well we're doing as a country. That's insane. Sure, the economy is up, but you know what else is up? Homelessness, unemployment, suicide, divorce, drug addiction, and many others. But we don't include those metrics to grade our performance. Just once I'd like the President to do a PowerPoint at the State of the Union Address. With a bunch of slides and graphs and charts.
- Some of this is a bit soft. Like, the 50% / 0% employment split says something about business's ability to command labor. If we had an amazing economy with 50% unemployment, this would imply a large population that businesses either didn't want or couldn't access. And the former says something very different than the latter.
  
  In that same vein, the ability to grow the economy is heavily predicated on how individual workers within the economy operate. A bunch of precarious workers with tentative access to capital, poor education, and dismal living conditions don't generate the kind of surplus value found in countries with ready access to new capital, high end education, and comfortable low-stress environments.
  
  From a raw numbers perspective, you can try and transition your economy to an entirely financialized scorecard. But then you just end up with two engineers optimizing the rate at which a dollar can be traded back and forth.
  
  Although, this might already technically describe the London economy.
  
  Either way, you're divorcing the means by which we measure new value in the economy from the actual measures of economic utility through layer after layer of abstraction. Yes, this can fool people while economic utility is increasing (or even while its increasing for a subset of the right kind of people). But eventually - at the 50% unemployment and large migrant caravans of jobless vagrants trawling across the country - you run into some very basic domestic policy problems that outshine the focus on GDP Go Up.

And remember that when they say shareholders, it's not a large number of people. There are a few people who want to make money pushing for the layoffs, and they know what the consequences are going to be.

“It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.” — George Carlin

Shareholders aren't the big issue. CEOs paying themselves hundreds of millions of dollars is.

Emphasis added since some seemed to not be reading all the words.

spoiler

asdfasfasfasfas
- Yup the CEO, shareholders, and middle management goals are diametrically opposed to the workers.
The hell. Shareholders are vampires that suck the profits from a business that should go to employee compensation. All while demanding more.

I wish there were more coops that I could shop at.
Fiduciary duty to shareholders is a gun to civilizations head.
- Good thing my entire retirement is dependent of stock price!
The existence of shareholders definitely is the big issue

"In, fire 30% of the workforce, new logo, boom! Out. You are now a fully trained management consultant."

That's a problem for the poors and whoever is holding the bag after I retire.

Well it's about time we set up a union for workers in IT in general.

[Verse 1] When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one For the Union makes us strong