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Comment by wheels | Hacker News Reader

I think calling them cockups is a stretch. A few points:

- Flexibility of the US labor market is one of the things that makes it attractive relative to labor markets of other rich countries: it's easy to hire more people when demand goes up, and fire them when it goes down.

- Demand just went down, all over the interwebs, since people miss doing things in real life.

- It's an easy time to fire a bunch of people without making your company look bad. I suspect some knock-on layoffs are CEOs taking advantage of the ability to clean house while everyone else is doing it.

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>- Demand just went down, all over the interwebs, since people miss doing things in real life.

More like people have less disposable income for frivolities now due to the rising CoL (especially in the EU) than during the pandemic when CoL was the same and everyone was stuck at home looking for ways to spend their extra covid money.

How companies thought the pandemic boom would last is beyond me.

> It’s an easy time to fire a bunch of people..

Totally agree. This is just cutting in places they’ve probably wanted to cut for a while. They’ll hire back in a year or two as things ramp up, and on projects they consider important.

> calling them cockups is a stretch

The gap between hot-as-hell hiring and firing is lower than 6 months, I don't think it's a stretch.

Now from their point of view, it's not a big problem. You gotta think long term, and long term it's good. Operational expenses going down, and will help lower wage! Awesome outcome! But hiring/firing isn't free so it would have been better to not hire ; there's also the human side of things but I think the conscience weight on their shoulders for beheading 12k people is marginal at best. So tis a cock up in the same sense you would call trashing an expired milk carton from your fridge a cockup.

From a dev perspective, the story is different, and I think cock up is probably a euphemism.

"Flexibility of the US labor market is one of the things that makes it attractive relative to labor markets of other rich countries: it's easy to hire more people when demand goes up, and fire them when it goes down."

I believe that this is a huge competitive advantage for the USA over most of the world. It's not pleasant, but many of us benefit, on net.

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