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Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

- The tech companies having issues during covid-19 are all heavily invested in travel/transportation(Uber/Lyft/Airbnb etc).

- They also are in industries that entirely use gig workers with personal contact in 90% of their services(airbnb the least of these).

- I don't see other tech companies getting hit this hard(the sky is not falling!).

- I really, really hope these laid off engineers find other jobs quickly and land on their feet.

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I am (for a few more weeks) a PM at a fairly popular applicant tracker company. I was just laid off. While recruiting is the first to get affected, you're underestimating how much of a bellwether HR tech truly is. If we're suffering this much, it's pretty clear what's about to happen. I've seen our internal data, things will be bad for a while.

The tech companies you identified are getting hit 1st. I expect to eventually see fallout in Fintech, Realestate, Advertising, anyone selling B2B SaaS (particularly to marketing/HR/ sales departments, SMB), etc. It will take time to feel the 2nd and 3rd order impacts. Hopefully, we bounce back quickly, but it's hard to not be a little concerned.

Unless their investors believe in a V-shaped recovery afterwards, and are willing to spend money now to gain market space from competitors who would die in the meantime.

Advertising seems to be hit - there are quite a few articles around e.g. YouTube paying substantially less to creators.

> It will take time to feel the 2nd and 3rd order impacts.

Ask people at Sun how relying on the .com economy worked out for the company, as one example.

Realestate has already been hit hard. Opendoor had like a 40% layoff + furlough.

I mostly agree at this point but wonder if covid's economic impact is just getting started and there's gonna be massive unforeseen 2nd and 3rd order effects. Hospitality/transportation and startups that were already in trouble (e.g. WeWork) might just be the tip of the iceberg.

Conversely, it's helped some tech companies (Amazon and Zoom) so who knows how this all shakes out.

My thoughts are that amidst the fear, the thing is, this economy was slowed solely due to the lockdown. If there was a bubble, it hasn't popped yet. There really is no reason for the economy being in the position its in except for the virus. I doubt there will be 3rd order effects that are too devastating. The lockdown will end soon enough and the economy will thaw and start moving again, maybe even to the roaring pace it was at before all this happened ... and after all that is when we will likely see the actual once-a-decade market-correction/recession/depression.

Maybe we should consider a higher level? For example, with our interconnected highly computerized trading systems and with every megacorp these days heavily invested in financials (think stock buy-backs) who knows? Definitely not the FED Reserve.

They deal with real, physical stuff. The virtual world has no externalities (except maybe a solar storm).

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