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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> And for no reason other than "everyone else is doing it“

This is the bizarre part of this all. Unlike the dotCom bust in the early 2000s, there was no earnings disaster that precipitated this. These companies are all profitable and some wildly profitable. How much of this so-called upcoming slowdown real and how much of it is simply in the heads of frightened, uncreative CEOs who are all looking to each other for clues about what to do? Because right now there is no recession.

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It’s not really about whether there is a recession happening/coming.

They just hired loads of people to do jobs that they now realise don’t need to be done.

So much of what companies were pouring money into in the past few years - i.e., VR, blockchain, assuming everyone would just keep increasingly living online - has turned out to be garbage.

> They just hired loads of people to do jobs that they now realise don’t need to be done.

I'm not sure you got the point.

It's sop to start and stop projects, hire and fire people, invest and cut, etc.

But this event is a concerted effort to fire a massive amount of people without criteria or rationale that's immediately evident.

FANGs just woke up one day and decided that they would decimate their companies.

I like the theory that it's another collusion to suppress wages, but they can't get sued for it this time.

they over hired during the pandemic thinking the growth would not stop.

Cutting the workers back now before shit hits the fan makes sense, as the recession is on the horizon and everybody can see it. It's not as if they can't just rehire if the recession doesn't pan out as badly as predicted.

> they over hired during the pandemic thinking the growth would not stop.

> the recession is on the horizon and everybody can see it

Everyone seems to be simply accepting these as given. “Growth” is not some outside force that starts and stops like a faucet. Recessions can’t be predicted, although 20 out of the last 3 were. 200K above-average incomes suddenly unemployed may very well lead to a recession. What is causing what?

> they over hired during the pandemic thinking the growth would not stop.

I have to call bullshit on this scapegoat.

We're seeing FANGs killing projects that started way before the pandemic, without providing any clear rationale.

At most there's this vague excuse that the company decided to scale down investments, but internally we're seeing entire teams being written down and everyone fired without any notice, from managers to engineers.

Turning into a self fulfilling prophecy

There are potentially massive improvements in productivity in the pipeline (ChatGPT/Lambda/Copilot), which might reduce headcount requirements.

I am vaguely uneasy with the thought that undirected random generators (or pattern marchers) can adequately fill current jobs. If true, it should give a whole lot of people pause re career choices. Automated infinite monkeys at keyboards?

Is there really nothing novel being done? If not, that little secret will put a knife in funding,

It is more about assistance to the engineers who are there to make them more productive, not replacing people entirely. Of course, if people are more productive then you don't need as many for the same level of outputs.

> There are potentially massive improvements in productivity in the pipeline (ChatGPT/Lambda/Copilot), which might reduce headcount requirements.

I’m not sure this hypothesis makes any sense. The bulk of all development work is fixing bugs and adding features to existing code, and in the process refactor code. How would automatic code generators help in that?

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