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Comment by willj | Hacker News Reader

Where are the happy offices these days? Which companies are the new “Google” who people are very eager to work for?

It's a depressing era with post-covid sugar crash, new wars, getting over inflation, job market being in the trash, etc. etc.

I'd argue there are no "happy offices" as a whole, and won't be for another ~10 years until everything settles and we're on an upwards trajectory (and sugar rush) again.

Why we as a society put up with this yoyo-ing economic model will never make sense to me. Nobody likes recessions, or layoffs, yet we're all complicit with them.

Everyone likes bubbles and hiring sprees though. If people didn't apply for jobs during hiring sprees these bubbles wouldn't happen either.

Economic shocks are simply unavoidable. Supposedly the goal is to avoid the yo-yo effect of them, e.g. try to control the rate of inflation and unemployment so it doesn't feel so chaotic. The COVID shutdown and money print to deal with it kind of worked on that front if you consider just how disruptive it all was and how people are still going about their lives, contributing to GDP.

The covid money injection caused this bubble though, these companies hired like crazy during that time and now did layoffs to a more normal level. It might have been a necessary stimulus for other sectors, but the tech sector really didn't need it so there it just caused a bubble.

I'm aware, but the money injection didn't come from a desire to inflate the bubble, more a desire to avoid the calamity from shutting down the world economy for 3 months.

I do think there's an issue where the Fed is absolutely terrified of asset prices dropping and contagion spreading on all fronts, now that they have found this intervention works, but that's kind of tangential to my point, that the goal actually is to avoid the yo-yo, with the chief metrics of unemployment and inflation to guide them.

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