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Comment by melenaboija | Hacker News Reader

> For Tech that may mean that the focus will shift towards profitability

Is it like tech or any other industry has ever focused (directly or indirectly) in something else? Maybe they just realized their superpowers are waning and they can’t keep hiring with obscene salaries indefinitely.

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I’m not sure I follow your cynicism: I celebrate ICs making 500k or 1M working for a company in the US instead of making “the same with a PhD in physics as an assembly line worker at Volkswagen”.

If an IC delivers 100MM in cost savings for a company because his software scales almost arbitrarily and gets paid highly: that’s a win for the working class population.

But that does not take into account VC-powered startups, like Uber, which never turned profit in their history, so that 500k-1M compensations for ICs are directly financed by VC money, which is unsustainable. I think that's what GP meant: the "superpower" to raise VC money is waning, and Sillicon Valey unicorns need to start operating like any other company, hence the layoffs.

Agree, as long as it is sustainable and realistic but this trend of firing people in the tech scene where even companies like Google have been involved, with still huge earnings, makes me doubt about it. And even worst it seems they don’t know either what is going on and if it is the right path.

Its probably a case of crab in bucket mentality

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