Autotomatomato t1_j6niru5 wrote on January 31, 2023 at 4:20 PM

The worst part of all these layoffs is they are only a mechanism to stifle wages. Most of these companies will rehire these positions at lower salaries and by a few of the larger ones doing it simultaneously they can poach each others talents in a strange dance.

When they panic about inflation they are only talking about workers wages.

aecarol1 t1_j6ojrwd wrote on January 31, 2023 at 8:07 PM

So they will lay off the people who know a particular system or process, then hire the other companies guy to do exactly the same thing?

But now they will have lowered productivity during the months it will take to train the ne guy in the old system + they will have the overhead of the generous severance packages they had to pay out.

tl;dr paying generous severance + training overhead of the "poached" people to learn your systems will easily destroy any imaginary savings.

Autotomatomato t1_j6okq2t wrote on January 31, 2023 at 8:13 PM

Amazon layed off the entire dept in their vertical gaming division when it was supposedly profitable and made headway in market penetration but they had to meet a quota so they jettisoned the ENTIRE team because they were around a long time.

This practice is ruining entire divisions across corporate America.

aecarol1 t1_j6or985 wrote on January 31, 2023 at 8:53 PM

Of course they are making foolish decisions. In your example they are simply gutting a division and possibly getting out of a specific business. My point was that companies were not "swapping" employees to keep wages low.

These companies are paying good severance, and the new guys would be coming in totally unprepared for the systems and projects underway. That would completely consume any imagined savings from driving wages down.

grannyte t1_j6pix2l wrote on January 31, 2023 at 11:51 PM

And this is how legacy code is created people

pmotiveforce t1_j6o44cs wrote on January 31, 2023 at 6:30 PM

Wait, but stick with me here, if they all try to hire them back there will be competition for them and salaries will remain high, no?

Not sure what you're saying. Salaries are determined by supply and demand in the market for your labor. If a bunch of companies later decide to hire people back, salaries will go back up.

grannyte t1_j6pj83u wrote on January 31, 2023 at 11:53 PM

Rightnow Yes the scramble for hiring devs is still high and other industries are trying to snag the devs as fast as they can.

I got laid off at the end of last year and a lot of recruiters I talked to since said that they had more then enough demands to swallow the whole force that got laid off

throwaway92715 t1_j6pjag1 wrote on January 31, 2023 at 11:54 PM

Is that really the worst part? These people make ridiculous amounts of money. If I were a major shareholder in Google, I wouldn't want to pay all that extra.

Not gonna lie, from outside the industry, unemployed tech workers sound like spoiled children to me. And when they start referring to themselves as "the workers," it legitimately makes me angry.

These are the people gobbling up homes across the country for 2x what the locals can afford. Their salaries are going down? GOOD! Let them go down A LOT FURTHER.

I've never seen a good justification for why FAANG salaries are so high other than "supply and demand," so now that they're falling and people are getting laid off? "Supply and demand."