A Host of Tech Companies, Including Coinbase, Robinhood, Lyft, and Stripe, Announce Hiring Freezes and Job Cuts (nytimes.com) 61
The macro story unfolding today is all the layoffs taking place in the tech industry. "Tech giants including Meta and Amazon have been slowing down their hiring for months, while smaller tech companies such as Robinhood and Coinbase have announced layoffs," reports the New York Times. "But rarely have so many job cuts and hiring freezes in the industry been disclosed on the same day." From the report: The technology industry's slowdown came into even sharper relief on Thursday as Amazon publicly said it had paused hiring for its corporate work force and several other technology companies announced job cuts. [...] At the same time, Lyft said it would cut 13 percent of its employees, or about 650 of its 5,000 workers. Stripe, a payment processing platform, said it would cut 14 percent of its employees, roughly 1,100 jobs. [...] Tech companies have led the way for the U.S. economy over the past decade, lifting the stock market during the worst days of the coronavirus pandemic. But in recent weeks, many of the largest firms reported financial results that suggested they were feeling the impact of global economic jitters, soaring inflation and rising interest rates.
Social media companies in particular have been grappling with a pullback in digital advertising over the last few months. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said last week that its head count would remain "roughly flat" through the end of next year. The company plans to shrink some teams and hire only for high-priority areas. Snap, Snapchat's parent company, laid off 20 percent of its employees in August, blaming challenging macroeconomic conditions. Last week, Microsoft told investors that new hires in this quarter "should be minimal." Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, also said that in this quarter it would hire fewer than half the number of people it added in the third quarter.
More layoffs at tech companies are in the works. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last week, has ordered cuts across the company, which employs about 7,500 people. Workers at Twitter have started circulating a "Layoff Guide" with tips on how to handle being laid off. On Thursday, Lyft said it had decided on layoffs in the face of "a probable recession sometime in the next year." All teams will be affected, said Logan Green and John Zimmer, the company's founders, in an email to employees. Over the summer, Lyft cut 2 percent of its employees, mostly as a result of shutting down its car rental business, and froze hiring. But the company still has "to become leaner," its founders said. It is "not immune to the realities of inflation and a slowing economy," which have led to increasing ride-share insurance costs. Lyft also said it planned to sell its first-party vehicle service business and expected employees on that team to be offered jobs at the acquiring company.
Social media companies in particular have been grappling with a pullback in digital advertising over the last few months. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said last week that its head count would remain "roughly flat" through the end of next year. The company plans to shrink some teams and hire only for high-priority areas. Snap, Snapchat's parent company, laid off 20 percent of its employees in August, blaming challenging macroeconomic conditions. Last week, Microsoft told investors that new hires in this quarter "should be minimal." Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube, also said that in this quarter it would hire fewer than half the number of people it added in the third quarter.
More layoffs at tech companies are in the works. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last week, has ordered cuts across the company, which employs about 7,500 people. Workers at Twitter have started circulating a "Layoff Guide" with tips on how to handle being laid off. On Thursday, Lyft said it had decided on layoffs in the face of "a probable recession sometime in the next year." All teams will be affected, said Logan Green and John Zimmer, the company's founders, in an email to employees. Over the summer, Lyft cut 2 percent of its employees, mostly as a result of shutting down its car rental business, and froze hiring. But the company still has "to become leaner," its founders said. It is "not immune to the realities of inflation and a slowing economy," which have led to increasing ride-share insurance costs. Lyft also said it planned to sell its first-party vehicle service business and expected employees on that team to be offered jobs at the acquiring company.
business model (Score:4, Interesting)
A bunch of the companies listed do not have a functioning business model and have never made money. Should we be surprised that they are struggling?
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It'd be a shame if they had to start working for a living.
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Gen Z seems awfully unhappy with work already, it'll be interesting to see how they respond to not being able to walk out of one job right into another for the first time.
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Of course, the fed giving money at 0% to their banking buddies can distort things. But, I suppose there are some that are gone with their cash.
rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat
high risk & reward (Re:business model) (Score:4, Insightful)
NASDAQ is full of companies playing the high-risk-high-reward game. It's hard to know what will take off down the road.
If you really believe you are smart at picking future winners and losers, then buy stock puts and shorts, and you can make money off their failure. When you become a zillionaire, I'll then listen to you.
For example, I never thought Google would be able to unseat established search players like AltaVista, InfoSeek, Lycos, Yahoo, and others. Although Google's search worked well at the time, their technique was for the most part not secret and not patentable. Thus, I expected the big players to copy what worked for Google and had deeper pockets to execute it on a bigger scale. But Google somehow managed things better than the others. Looking at the product and market position alone doesn't tell the full story. And they may find a closely related niche and pivot their business model to something that takes off unexpectedly. They can morph.
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All the search engines had ads (that I remember). That's not something Google pioneered.
> Those other companies all had management that was laughably incompetent
5 relatively large search companies just happened to all have bad management?
Re: high risk & reward (Re:business model) (Score:2)
I canâ(TM)t remember why now, but Lycos was my favourite generic search engine. Yahoo was hands down the best with their hierarchical search, but it seemed handed picked or incapable of scaling as the internet grew exponentially. Alta Vista was well regarded, but I only remembered it as a fall back when the others failed or if I wanted something hard to find. Google was basic, but it was fast. Even if it returned a ton of unrelated results, its speed made that easier to cope with. It also picked u
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I would say the same about Apple, especially how Apple went from making pretty colored computers in 2000 to being the main smartphone maker in existence. A company rarely gets to step in and completely seize an industry, and Apple managed to do that with two markets (MP3 players and smartphones), as well as make a notable presence in others.
However, Apple is based from consumers rather than enterprises, so a deep recession which causes people to not bother buying the latest generation of phone, or gadget.
T
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Although Google's search worked well at the time, their technique was for the most part not secret and not patentable. Thus, I expected the big players to copy what worked for Google
They could have copied Google, but they didn't. The prevailing belief was that curated "portals" like AOL were the future, and search was a dead end that would fade away as the portals improved.
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> They could have copied Google, but they didn't.
Which is odd. There were 5 or so large search engines and none of them borrowed Google's technique (to any significance) even when Google gained clear momentum. I can understand 1 or 2 ignoring Google, but not 5.
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Not really. Look at Apple and smartphones.
Pre-iPhone, we had Blackberry, Nokia Symbian, Microsoft Windows Mobile, and PalmOS as the main contenders for phone operating systems. When the iPhone came out, none of those companies took Apple seriously - Nokia laughed it off as a fad, and Blackberry igno
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> Google disrupted search
Link tracing isn't that hard to clone.
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Do you play poker?
Counting on a pivot/morph to save a failing company is like holding a poker hand that is missing a card and hoping the card you need turns up.
I didn't say anything about predicting the future, you can only lose money for so long before you need more and it is getting harder and more expensive to find money to burn.
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Higher interest rates make it harder to justify continuing to shovel money into bullshit companies. This is entirely predictable.
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A bunch of the companies listed do not have a functioning business model and have never made money. Should we be surprised that they are struggling?
Uber's stock went way up just the other day. Unlike Lyft, Uber has never made a penny and they have no plan or path to profitability either. So, whothefuck knows what gives. But yeah the economy is in very bad shape, so no surprise some tech companies are reacting.
Re:decades in the making (Score:5, Insightful)
This inflation isn't really due to government policies, it is mostly on the capitalism side. First a big drawback during the pandemic, which meant a lot of people had to rely on savings, but the economy pretended to stay good because those with money were spending a lot of deliveries so that only the servant class would be out in the danger zone, but that is mostly although with some people still not fully back out and about yet. Second, big supply chain issues became apparent during the pandemic although it began before the pandemic which manufacturers noticed if not the consumers, that hasn't really been fixed yet. Then the energy problem, mostly due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine - it's not just energy either, that natural gas is an important part of making fertilizer, so not making fertilizer and not shipping huge amounts of grain is just going to be a growing problem we'll see next year. The energy problems means rising prices everywhere, rising costs in making nearly everything, including food. Except for the war, most of these problems were not caused by a government by but a capitalist system focusing on short term gains and just-in-time manufacturing.
None of this is stuff that a government can really control or fix in a short time period; you can't wave a want and suddenly have the supply chain work smooth, you can't redirect the flow of goods and services overnight, and in general a capitalist government cannot control the economy. Now it is true that a government can make it worse very quickly - witness the Pound Sterling falling extremely fast due to ideological actions that were badly timed and not thought out; never mind Brexit screwing up a major economy before then.
Money does NEED to be printed in many cases. Armchair economists that claim a money supply should remain fixed and never grow (ala the gold standard) are delusional. More people, more jobs, more stuff being bought and sold, you need to print money to handle that, but not too much or too little.
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1. People created real money before governments got around to printing fake paper version of it.
2. Inflation is a government phenomena, government creates inflation, not capitalism. Capitalism creates deflation by making money more valuable because it drives prices *down*, not up. Government straight creates money out of thin air without any economic rhyme or reason except for political reasons. Private money is created and valued in the capitalist markets just as well, however it is created due to econo
Hindsight is magic, you aren't (Score:1)
Test your non-gov't-money and/or anti-fiat theory on a different country first. When it works there well for about 50 years, then we can safety consider it. Until then, we are just a giant guinea pig if we follow you now.
Just about every industrial country experienced tough inflation. Are 90% of govt's "screwed up"?
You can argue US gov't "over-stimulated" economy during pandemic, but inflation is a smaller problem than a great depression. It was hard to know at the time the effects of the pandemic on the ec
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USA was that country before the Fed was established in 1913, it became the largest *lender* and manufacturer without fiat and without debt but with actual treasury in the Treasury.
All industrial countries today are screwed up the same way or possibly worse, yes. Everyone pegs their currency to the dollar and fights in a self destructive 'kill my own currency more than the USD' fight.
I am not even talking about the pandemic, though it accelerated the problem obviously, I suppose I don't write well enough fo
Re:Hindsight is magic, you aren't (Score:4, Informative)
USA was that country before the Fed was established in 1913.
Yes, and the 19th century was riddled with financial panics. They were far more frequent and serious than they are today.
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Financial panics in the USA in 19th century were local and had no bearing on the manufacturing ability of the country.
I believe I had too many discussions on these topics back in the day... it really makes no sense to redo all of this all over again, I will just say that the governments will *not* successfully fight inflation, they will all succumb to it, it's simply because they have no tools left, even by raising the interest rates at this point, they cannot use that to return manufacturing back to the US
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USA was that country before the Fed was established in 1913.
Yes, and the 19th century was riddled with financial panics. They were far more frequent and serious than they are today.
The panics of the 19th century were pretty much limited to the monied investing classes. Most folks days came and went as usual. The pig farmer in Oklahoma was rarely affected by them. Sometimes he was, and would lose his farm... but not usually. Usually these things came and went before most of the populace noticed. As another poster put it, they tended to be localized (and most of the time localized in a big city).
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The limited effects were because most of the population were subsistence farmers, not because of the type of currency in use. Today, almost everyone is in the "moneyed" class because unlike 200 years ago, they actually have a need to use money.
Since gold didn't prevent the people with money having financial meltdowns, maybe instead of switching the country back to the gold standard as the OP wants, a better way to protect people from economic uncertainty would be to have everyone in the country become an or
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Yeah, and today USA has over 100 million people who do no work at all, over 7 million of them are men between ages of 25 and 54, who choose not to work and are not looking for work and because of that are not counted towards the number of unemployed. Maybe USA would be better off if some of these millions became pig farmers or something at all.
But don't worry, it doesn't matter what I or anyone wants, the paper money will be obliterated, we will have a choice of what to do then, nobody has to force anybody
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OK. Once paper money gets obliterated and we're back to gold, Elon Musk will point his Starships at metal asteroids so that he can further increase his wealth by snarfing up more gold than is available in all of the Earth's crust.
Then, just like the Spaniards 500 years ago, we'll find out again how a glut of gold can tank the economy.
And apparently, you somehow think this is all the fault of some slackers living in their parents' basements. Maybe it's because you're just certain that idle hands to the devil
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Gold never tanked any economy, it however prevents the cheats and other politicians from running deficits and saddling the future generations with unbearable debt.
Also you got your cause and effect mixed up, our socialist policies that allow the governments to grow the supply of fake money and thus create inflation as well as taxing income of those, who actually work provide millions, hundreds of millions with a way not to work but to eat, that's fine and dandy until the inflation kills the economy, then ev
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It not only tanked the Spanish Empire's economy, the empire itself never recovered and ended up in the dustbin of history.
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you are quite uninformed though, they extracted many dozens of tons, possibly hundreds of tons of gold and lived large on it. They fought wars with this gold. They murdered and plundered for that gold. Would it be different if they came and murdered and plundered for paper money? I suppose, it could be just printed instead, they wouldn't have to go across the ocean to print it, it's just nobody would care for their paper. Instead of setting up shops, production, manufacturing, farming they kept fightin
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Test your non-gov't-money and/or anti-fiat theory on a different country first.
Silver and gold have about 3000 total years of experience working quite well, both as fiat and non-government money.
It's paper money that has yet to prove lasting value. The stuff we have now in the U.S. has only been around about 50 years, because U.S. currency pre and post gold standard are entirely different things.
Also P.S. if you love wars then you should love paper money, because endless ability to print money is what fun
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Individual consumers and businesses don't print money, government does.
Also, no, the energy problem began before Putin invaded. It began when policymakers in Washington and the EU decided to curb the supply before fully addressing the need.
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Okay tax consumption. So what tax rate rwould you set on biying a $44 billion dollar company? Would 10% be good?
When most people talk consumption tax they stop at realestate. Yet the biggest thing the rish buy is other companies. Only poor people would actually pay a consumption tax becsue they consume the vast majority of goods.
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since when is an investment considered consumption? Is Elon about to eat the Twitter servers and float around on Twitter desks for pleasure?
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since when is an investment considered consumption? Is Elon about to eat the Twitter servers and float around on Twitter desks for pleasure?
He'll do that after he fires a bunch of people [marketwatch.com].
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well, you are wrong on what inflation is but you are also oblivious on socialism in the USA. Over 100 million people didn't work in the USA last month, they still ate and a place to live, etc. SS and welfare and disability checks and other forms of handouts (yes, those are all tax transfer based and debt based handouts, not any kind of investment earnings), that is socialism. Under capitalism people would be working.
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I don't watch television, so your allegations are unfounded. You can read my comments over the years, I don't know when 'Tucker' started on TV I am almost completely sure I was commenting here from the late nineties with approximately the same ideas, so probably before Tucker :)
Of course you are wrong on socialism in the USA. Over 100 million people didn't work in the USA last month, they still ate and a place to live, etc. SS and welfare and disability checks and other forms of handouts (yes, those are al
Wait, so you're telling me... (Score:2)
That companies who made most of their profits pumping worthless crypto and meme stonks are having trouble making money in a market correction? I'm stunned!
Not technology companies. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd argue that none of those are technology companies. We call too many companies that use computers technology companies.
Sure they use or even develop software but it's for their own internal uses. They do not develop technology as an end product to sell. They sell a service.
These are not "tech" companies (Score:3, Insightful)
They are shell games and "get rich quick" scams using a computer
Good riddance to them all
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indeed, anything having to do with "cryptocoin" or similar is just casino with digital tokens. Of course they will flop, and let's not even get into the "stablecoin" scams that back maybe a few percent of their coins "value" while the rest of actual money put into them go into pockets.
Under the covers... (Score:1)
...they're offshoring work.
When everyone is remote, it doesn't matter if the dude is in a Bangalore slum, or a San Francisco apartment.
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SF's advantage is they have a big pool of smart people from all over the world who collaborate both formally and informally. India's guest worker program is too restrictive to duplicate that well. Plus, Bangalore is not exactly friendly to the uninitiated. China also tried to duplicate "The Valley" but failed because of the govt's insular and controlling nature.
Era of Free Money has ended (Score:2)
It's funny (Score:5, Insightful)
In the movie Sneakers, when Martin meets up with Cosmo at Setec Astronomy, they have a discussion about how to bring down a bank. Make people believe it's going under, people withdraw their money, and the bank goes under.
In a similar vein, all these companies which keep saying they see bad things coming down the pipe are now setting conditions to have bad things come down the pipe. Stop hiring, fire people, and others will believe things are going to get bad which will, eventually, turn out to be true.
As an aside, it should be noted not a single CEO or head of company has said they're having their salary and perks cut to help save money. Nor have these same companies stopped buying back stock to the tune of billions of dollars.
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This isn't me being a commie pinko Lefty this is literally what the head of the American Federal reserve has said his stated goal is. Senator Elizabeth Warren just came out finally and asked him how many jobs he plans to kill.
It's basically like opec. If all the CEOs get together like a cartel and agree to do Mass layof
The ruling class is yanking the choke chain (Score:2)
Employees, which is most of the people on this forum, got a teensy tiny bit of bargaining power because of the large number of baby boomers who either died or retired in the wake of covid.
Now the ruling class wants that power back. Liz Warren finally came out and asked Jerome Powell how many jobs he's going to kill. I'm not expecting an answer and I don't think she is either.
I understand
Hiring vs layoffs (Score:2)
It make sense for an Amazon to freeze or slow hiring in the face of a slowing economy. If the workload lessens the current workforce can handle it and it avoids future layoffs. With Amazon, it's corporate hiring that is frozen, distribution appears to be still growing; so the focus is sharper than the old "hire cause we may need them later and might not get them" mode. At least Amazon has a viable business model that can adjust to the market.
Coinbase, Robinhood et. al. were just shots in the dark in hope
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Amazon has ongoing continual layoffs all the time. They just call it performance management. They'll be hiring again soon enough, once wage pressure eases a bit more, in order to replace the people they are constantly firing or driving out of the company.
Thought you needed 60 days notice for mass layoffs (Score:2)