The U.S. economy is booming. So why are tech companies laying off workers?::undefined
Using out of touch metrics that say nothing about how the median household is doing is not helpful.
On the other hand if you measure by how much the shareholders are getting richer, the layoffs are exactly why the economy is considered booming. Record layoffs lead to record short term profits for the wealthy few.
Combined with billions in weapons being ordered and produced, oil producing competition being crushed, while gimping Europs growth. The Chinese hurting from the Evergrande debacle and the lithography embargo.
Plenty of reasons for the US as an entity to celebrate.
The same reason everything costs more without there being inflation, greed and the never ending desire to make the line go up. At the end of the day that’s all a publicly traded company cares about. Line go up. They will do whatever they can legally, or hidden from legal scrutiny to make that happen.
Laying people off is a way to juice the stock price in the short term. So perhaps the “economy is booming” because of the layoffs?
The stock market isn’t the economy.
Absolutely, layoffs are exactly why some tech companies can boast of record profits.
The US Economy is only booming for rich people.
The past 40 years have shown me that no matter how well the economy is doing in the news, it doesnt mean shit for most Americans.
That does not explain it either
Wealthy shareholders and C-suite executives are trying to squeeze out as much profit as they can. Their boom leads to bust for the rest of us.
Actually the bottom 50% have seen the most wage growth.
I call bullshit. That is not what anyone sees.
Data doesn’t lie.
I think one problem with the “vibes” everyone is giving here is that most people aren’t as poor as they think they are. I suspect a lot of people on this site would not believe that one third of American households make less than $50,000 a year, and 8% of American households make less than $15,000 a year.. If you’re making $80k and struggling, it can be tough to hear that “the poor” are doing better because you think you are one of the poor.
I appreciate a data supported argument, and love that you actually linked sources.
One thing that I feel is missing in most of the linked analyses is that inflation has also hit unevenly, and the price of basic goods has increased significantly more than overall inflation. Which would explain why households still have less disposable income, also the mean debt burden is much higher leading to loan costs being more common.
“Real wages” takes that into account. The term “real” (as in “real wages”, “real earnings”, etc) means the increase in money minus the increase in inflation.
So for example the top paragraph says there’s been a “3.2 increase in real earnings”. That means there’s been a (pulling numbers out of my ass to illustrate): 7.5% increase in earnings, but also a 4.3% increase in inflation.
But price increases of cereals ( bread, pasta, grains, etc.) increased by about 7,5 % last year alone, which is more than the inflation, and more than the increase after inflation.
That’s where people might complain. They still can’t afford food, as food prices increase faster than overall inflation
That’s a fair criticism, and the Biden administration is looking into more specific action with regards to grocery stores. More work needs to be done to bring food costs to a reasonable level. I’d also support a revising of the CPI to better account for necessities like food and housing.
Data can absolutely be misleading. Liars, damn liars, and statisticians, as they say. And trying to produce one number that somehow represents everyone will never work, whatever economists want to think.
The fact is many of the super-poor are doing better because government benefits like social security are indexed to inflation, meaning they are actually keeping up.
Personally, my real earnings are down over $10,000 a year. My whole industry has stagnant wages. Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.
At this point there are more people trying to reject data based arguments with that cliche than there are people making bogus cases according to it.
And trying to produce one number that somehow represents everyone will never work
Well it’s a good thing no one is attempting that?
Personally
You’re an outlier. Understand that you’re not the center of the universe, please.
Well it’s a good thing no one is attempting that?
Oh, what do you call a statement like “The US economy is booming?”
You’re an outlier. Understand that you’re not the center of the universe, please.
Are you going to tell me I am the only one struggling and not seeing wage gains? Do you want to tell me my experience does not matter?
Do you just not understand the concept of other people existing?
that’s what we’re trying to get you to do!
wat
$80k is a struggle salary where I live but only if you have the ambition to own property and raise multiple kids. The common narrative is that everyone could do that on manual labor wages back in 1950 but that’s definitely bullshit.
The real travesty is that my kids teachers are pulling down $25k - absolutely ridiculous.
Not only that: once, I went to take the qualifying exam for California teachers and the room was full of people yammering about that sweet $25k they were about to start making in just two short years when they get their credential. That’s poor.
I see, you forgot to say Union and corporate soulless husk. They can’t be bothered to upvote you on just facts alone.
The job market is trying to correct but it’s going to take a long time.
After a decent inflation push blue collar wages have to come up or people just starve to death and people aren’t very fond of that.
Honestly some of that lower-end boost is probably work from home bolstering the job market is bringing white collar jobs into areas that are deficient.
What I haven’t figured out yet, as hell New York City and San Francisco haven’t managed to completely outsource all their work to Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. You should be able to hire developers out of there for less than half the big city rates.
horse shit. if you wanna play the twist the numbers game, do it in an article on your blog. booooring
I give data and sources below, but I’m sure that’s too booooooooooooring for your tiny little brain.
The answer is that in this context “Economy” means the stock price of billionaires’ vested companies, not the prosperity of a common citizen (a.k.a peasant)
It’s a bunch of stuff.
The big companies all seriously upped their hiring game when COVID sent everybody work from home and all of a sudden a nice, cheap, workforce opened up all over the place. It’s not that they’re overstaffed at this point, but now that they can say look they’re doing it over there too! The market’s rough! A lot of big places have decided it’s a good time to shed souls. They now have the opportunity to cut the more expensive people and the underperforming people, at the same time they get to increase their margins and improve their stock performance.
Interest rates are up so money’s not free anymore (for the time being), advertising on the internet’s getting harder due to legislation and public sentiment. SEO is getting harder. Everyone’s dumping every available dollar they have into AI hoping to win big at buzzword bingo. Wages are starting to catch up to inflation they’re paying more for what people they have. And honestly it’s just an easy time for them to grab an extra couple of bucks.
A great number of the big guys probably are about to take a bath in corporate real estate.
There’s also a another possible recession sitting around the corner. I believe there’s already talk of the feds cutting rates again for a bit to try to side step it.
Honestly most of the stuff isn’t really that new. But when Microsoft decides to do it, Google says hey that’s a good idea let’s do it! Everybody else is going to jump on board. Three - six months from now (assuming we’re not mid recession) they’ll probably be taking out billboards and reengaging bring a friend incentives again.
And honestly it’s just an easy time for them to grab an extra couple of bucks.
This is what it is. You didn’t have to say more than this. The soulless husks that we know as directors want more money for themselves.
- Companies value short term gains not long term projects
- COVID overhiring
- Salaries are too high for peons, they are trying to readjust
- Market is spooked due to the interest rates and SVB collapse
- New product offerings are not exciting consumers
- The belief AI developments can offer performance improvments
- The belief AI developments can weather regulatory scrutiny
Booming for the rich?
“The stock market is booming”. Fixed the first part of the title for you.
As for why all of the layoffs? Because in the short term it usually causes the quoted bit above.
because capitalism is not about the workers, not about the quality of the product, and not about helping anyone. It doesn’t give a shit about anyone except whichever monkey is on top, and would argue vehemently against the suggestion that it should.
I’d go so far as to say that what it IS about, is not being human. Perhaps it’s about becoming a dragon? but even that implies some degree of personality. Capitalism is unrelenting, banal evil, for the sake of being evil, with an endless litany of specious lies to justify its utterly retarded bullshit.
I’ve always said capitalism and corporations are anti-social. They make society worse for profit.
They overhired during the pandemic adding to already bloated teams which could be made cost efficient during low prime-rate times. The tech job market is correcting back to proper levels. Schools and programs churning out new tech workers are contributing to this massively over populated job space.
Literally downvoted for the truth about the cuts. They’re still above 2020 head counts.
However, there is still a huge shortage of tech workers. Just because huge companies do layoffs doesn’t mean the overall hiring demand is down. Those handful of companies aren’t the entire economy.
Except the overall hiring demand IS down and it has been since December.
You know it’s bad when across the globe, IT systems administrators aren’t even getting hit up by RECRUITERS.
In the U.S. at least, it’s been a continually “in demand” field since we recovered from the U.S. housing market crash of '08-'09… right up until before the New Year.
Now I’m hearing the same thing from people in the field worldwide and that is that there’s been an uncharacteristic hiring stall in a historically consistent field of IT infrastructure.
The same is supposedly true in other portions of infrastructure as well, likely because companies still view infrastructure as a cost center instead of a force multiplier.
It remains to be seen if the hiring silence will extend to full stack devs/programmers if this heavy layoff follow the leader garbage goes on much longer, but if it hits “revenue generator” departments, I’m afraid we’ll start to see other companies tech stacks failing like Twitter’s current functionality has.
Because they hired too many
Tech is a cost center (in most cases) not a revenue center so despite us being an invaluable resource, IT jobs are generally the first cut when investors need to be paid
Even the state of the economy is spun these days. Who even knows at this point, depending who you ask and what factors you look at.
I wonder if it isn’t a symptom of things going from high competition environment between new internet services and older stuff like cable to more established systems of revenue which don’t have as much incentive to compete for workers or market share. So maybe that’s the end result of approaching monopoly.
