Tech Firms Are Slowing Layoffs But Still Not Yet Resuming Hiring (bloomberg.com) 38
Tech companies aren't yet ramping up hiring after massive layoffs over the past year, despite a surge in interest in artificial intelligence, requiring workers with special skills. From a report: Still, job cuts in the tech industry appeared to slow in June and July and are on track to be even lower this month, according to an analysis by research firm Jefferies, citing proprietary data as well as that from job marketplace TrueUp. The tech sector had some of the earliest and steepest workforce reductions as the economic downturn forced companies to cut costs and eliminate a glut of staffing created during the pandemic boom. So far this year, there have been 342,671 layoffs in the tech industry, according to Jefferies and TrueUp, well ahead of the 243,075 for all of last year.
The Chair of the federal reserve (Score:3, Interesting)
I was going pretty well, lots of layoffs, slowing economy, exactly what the Fed reserve wanted (though the Administration wasn't too happy about it), but the large scale banking deregulation done by the previous Administration left the banks much, much weaker than anyone realized, so they had to slow down on the interest rate hikes. That plus a large government infrastructure project (the "Build Back Better" and "Inflation Reduction Act") are making it even harder to trigger a recession (at least without taking the banks down with it).
The counter argument is "we can't just keep printing money!" but of course if you're economy is growing you either print money or you get a recession from deflation, and, well, our economy was and is growing. Pretty well actually. The trouble wasn't printing money, it was printing it, giving it all to the top, and letting them use it to buy out their competitors. When I was a kid there were a dozen grocery stores all competing with sales, today I've got 2. 3 if I count Walmart who never does sales.
It's kind of like OPEC. Everybody in charge, the CEOs and the Fed, would really like a recession, but not if it means they lose money. So they don't want to pull back on production (losing the short term profits) for the sake of the long term profits that come with desperate workers taking lower pay for longer hours without all this talk of Unions and working from home.
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Hiking interest rates never made any sense, and the Fed keeps doubling down on it though it simply does not work. Instead we should keep interest rates low but don't give out loans frivolously .. is that hard? Low interest rates increase production, which in turn increases the number of employed people. Also, more products and services means decent quality-of-life can be more affordable.
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Price control doesn't work. It's been tried in many countries, manufacturers halt or reduce production or production quality. New players don't enter the market. Results in long lines for groceries and empty store shelves. Any fix to prices has to come from promoting competition and increasing production.
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There is no such thing as a new player or competition in the market. Take a look. https://wordpress.soscuisine.c... [soscuisine.com]
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Price controls really matter when there's price gouging going on. That's typically in a situation where it's just impossible to increase capacity to match demand. A typical situation would be e.g. houses where you have to wait for approvals to come through, builders to be trained and cement factories to be built before buildings can be built which you have to wait for for them to be delivered. Another similar situation is semiconductors where it can take years to build a factory. For a period of time everyo
Re:The Chair of the federal reserve (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not the only other way to control inflation.
Inflation can be reduced by:
1. Higher interest rates.
2. Less money lending (by any means other than raising interest rates).
3. Reduction in government deficit spending (don't spend more than taxes cover)
4. Raising taxes without increasing government spending (the other way to reduce deficit spending)
5. Print less money.
6. Repair broken supply chains.
IF it so happens that monopolism is jacking prices up, then break up the monopolies (and cartels)! It's totally doable, you just need your government to grow a spine. Break them up and make them compete against each other for your business, and you can watch prices come right down while quality goes up, and more jobs become available.
Price controls aren't even in the list because they do not address any of the root causes of inflation and they wind up causing terrible harm to everyone.
Sure you can completely destroy (Score:2)
The supply chains have been fixed for some time. If you stop printing money all that does is contract your economy unne
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Another way to control inflation is for people to stop buying stuff [marketwatch.com].
Right now, the majority of inflation is being directly caused by companies raising prices [marketwatch.com] to earn [marketwatch.com] higher profits [marketwatch.com]. If people stop buying, prices will go down.
That only works if you can stop buying (Score:2)
We're not talking about people skipping avocado toast at Starbucks. The monopolists have bought out grocery stores and the pharmaceutical industry and frankly the entire healthcare industry. We've also put our entire transportatio
Not so (Score:3)
Most industries are duopolies or borderline monopolies at this point. Healthcare in Florida is owned by basically one company, to the tune of 80% of all healthcare facilities of any kind being owned by that company. Every other day
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we should keep interest rates low but don't give out loans frivolously .. is that hard?
Nope. It's called Basel III [wikipedia.org]. It's a lot of dry financial stuff, but the gist is, as a fellow auditor once so perfectly apt quipped, you only qualify for a loan if you don't need one.
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The counter argument is "we can't just keep printing money!" but of course if you're economy is growing you either print money or you get a recession from deflation, and, well, our economy was and is growing.
This argument again? Are you really sure it's deflation that we should be afraid of? We're having a crippling inflation...
Also, during hundreds of years when it wasn't possible for the government to print money (as in your neck of the woods they had real money, the pieces of eight), the economy was rapidly growing, thus by your theory there'd be massive recession and deflation. Yet the prices remained stable.
Yeah, I am (Score:2, Interesting)
Chinese wages are going up and we're out of housing inventory from the last round of infrastructure spending. Meanwhile mega cor
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Regardless of Sen Warren's claims interest rate hikes by the fed are to slow down inflation by reducing borrowing. Claiming it is to " it was to yank the chains of anyone working from home or demanding better pay." is flat-earth level conspiracy mongering.
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The past 10-15 years of hiring was all financed with cheap-money debt. The printing of that cheap-money lead to inflation. Interest rates must rise to curtail the cheap-money financing. Layoffs and eventual closure of many inefficient "startups" that depended on constant borrowing instead of turning a profit are the inevitable result. This isn't some conspiracy to "engineer mass layoffs", it's a mechanism to allow the market to finally correct.
You can either have full employment of unproductive people b
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What economic downturn? (Score:5, Interesting)
The obvious to the man in the street (Score:3)
Real wage declines due to inflation. The types of jobs on offer aren't across the board. The only reason you aren't seeing high unemployment is that there are a lot of people still on the sidelines in the hangover from COVID.
What was being promised was stagflation, and more or less what we are getting. Eventually Wall Street will realize the hollowness of what is going on and we'll see a broad-based drop. I will get hammered since i'm invested, but it's going to happen. I'm surprised it hasn't happened
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Depends on who you are (Score:5, Interesting)
The lower middle and middle are getting squeezed though. But we did it to ourselves. 4 decades of supply side trickle down economics and zero anti-trust law enforcement. We scoffed at Unions even as we should have been paying attention to studies that show they bring in significantly more money than non-union shops, even adjusted for union dues. And we blissfully voted for banking deregulation that's allowed the banks to rake us over the coals left and right.
We know what we need to do to fix all this, we just don't wanna do it.
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But the economy in general has been going gangbusters with lower unemployment than we've seen in my lifetime.
The economy has been doing well, but certainly not going gangbusters. We have been experiencing 2-2.5% GDP growth since the economy finished rebounding by the end of 2021. Inflation has been very high, and unemployment is no longer a great measurement for economic strength in the US because of a combination of inequality (not all jobs are created equal) and an aging population reducing the size of the available workforce.
I personally would put the yardstick for the US economy going gangbusters closer to 3.5
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OK but the US hasn't sustained that level of growth this century.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
If you ask me it was mostly a mirage anyways since those periods of fast growth were during periods of fast population growth:
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-c... [brookings.edu]
So if you look at the real GDP per capita growth rate, it centers closely around 2%
https://seekingalpha.com/ [seekingalpha.com]
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You mean you've not been paying attention to the economy?
My personal example is that in the past 3 years I downsized my house and mortgage by 70%, while getting a job paying approximately 50% more - and my end-of-month cash reserves are roughly the same in absolute dollars as in 2019, despite being much more frugal.
And I'm not doing poorly. But damn near everyone else I know is struggling, and most of those people are decidedly middle class professionals with multiple household incomes.
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My personal example is that in the past 3 years I downsized my house and mortgage by 70%, while getting a job paying approximately 50% more - and my end-of-month cash reserves are roughly the same in absolute dollars as in 2019, despite being much more frugal.
Those four statement cannot all be true. CPI inflation since 2019 has been 19% overall. If your housing costs reduced by 30%, your total inflation would be even less than this. Of course it depends on what your specific budget looks like, but housing makes up 30% of the CPI. If your housing dropped 30%, CPI would estimate your total inflation impact over the past 4 years to be 4% total (not 4% per year). With a 50% increase in income, you should have significantly higher discretionary income today even if y
The hiring spree days are over (Score:2)
socially responsible investing is done (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were making career and life decisions... (Score:3)
...my assumption would be that as an undifferentiated block, the number of tech jobs is not going to increase significantly any time in the next decade. My crystal ball says at least as many jobs will fall away as are created. Total guess... but if I were gambling with my future, I'd err on the conservative side and not be the "new guy" entering IT today.
However... nevermindme above has pointed out that what are in demand are pragmatic, flexible, experienced people. If you are one of those people, with a proven track record of rolling with change, it's not a bad world to be in. I'm personally squarely in that camp - I've had outsourcing, layoffs, and restructuring happen all around me, but I've been employed continuously since 1992.
Be willing to abandon paradigms, keep sound strategy in mind, and don't confine your thinking to the narrow slice in your employment contract, and there's probably a place for you.
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The era of growing productivity due to new computer technology has ended. Blockchain, web3, "metaverse", self-driving cars, fusion, superconductors, quantum computers... all have been a dud. It appears the newest one is about to fall and make the biggest impact crater of them all: chatbots. (Chatbots!)
There has been no significant breakthrough in the last decade or so, and most of the invention has been in the field of how to create a new grow-fast-sell-fast scheme.
So yes, the programming job market is abou
Big tech was big stupid .... (Score:2)
What I've seen here in the midwest (where we tend to ignore the "trendy" and "latest hotness", and do things at a slower pace) is... your average small or mid-sized companies are chugging right along in this economy. They're still employing as many tech workers as ever.
The problem is the "big tech" companies and all of their nonsense. I mean, think about it. You've got Apple who went "all in" with this VR headset, which costs $3500 and isn't taking the world by storm. Meanwhile, they launched a series of "
And yet, tech *jobs* are still plentiful (Score:3)
If you do software development, or infrastructure management, you are still in high demand. Big Tech soaked up so much talent that they didn't actually need, that everybody else couldn't afford to compete. Now those "other" companies are starting to fill those roles they've had open for a long time.
We are still on the way down (Score:2)
Once we start to emerge from the bottom we will likely enter a period where companies start bringing in tech people on contracts. It won't be until the economy is strong for a few years until hiring really begins to surge again.