[larrymyers]

The feels like exceptionally lazy reporting in the NYT. What was the expectation, that tech companies would be up and to the right perpetually? That public tech companies are immune to general market downturns?

While a lot of tech companies are going through post-pandemic layoffs, most of them have headcounts that are still larger than where they were in Feb 2020, and have valuations that show steady growth.

My prediction is that over the next decade we're going to see a narrative in the media that hiring is still exceptionally difficult in the technology sector. There's a very real chance that this round of layoffs drives students and recent graduates into other industries if big tech is no longer seen as an easy path to outsized compensation. It was real side effect of the dotcom bust and the 2008 recession.

I'm excited to see what new companies are going to form in the next few years now that it's a tiny bit more difficult for the big tech companies to suck up all the oxygen in the room.

[ciphol]

This is typical NYT reporting on tech.

"I literally heard it from NYT reporters at the time. There was a top-down decision that tech could not be covered positively, even when there was a true, newsworthy and positive story. I'd never heard anything like it." [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

[nindalf]

This decision matters because the NYT influences other journalists to a large degree.

The person who took that autocratic decision was AG Sulzberger, the 37-year old publisher and chairman of the NYT. Surely a man wielding so much power and influence would have earned the post through merit and hard work, right? In reality it’s a hereditary post of the Sulzberger family.

It’s shocking that a man who is a product of nepotism has so little written about him. Where’s the investigative reporting into this momentous decision 5 years ago? Where’s the criticism for biasing reporters in this manner? There’s nothing because the family is that powerful.

[justin66]

> The person who took that autocratic decision was AG Sulzberger,

What evidence is there of this?

Asking because it's not traditionally the case that the NYT editorial staff needs to be interfered with by ownership in order to make terrible decisions.

[nindalf]

This wasn’t instructions to the editorial staff, it was to the regular reporters. This is alleged by reporters who heard of it second hand.

I wish I could link you to the investigative exposé about this decision published by the NYT, but they don’t look inward. And no other paper looked at them either. Instead they sycophantically copied the same direction to investigate tech.

[justin66]

> they don’t look inward

On that point we can agree.

[fmajid]

Not so at all. The Judy Miller warmongering fiasco was directly attributable to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (A.G. Sulzberger's dad), whose favorite she was for whatever reason.

[msteffen]

Matt Yglesias claimed it in a meme: https://mobile.twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1588193914640...

[FlyingSnake]

quis custodiet ipsos custodes.

You lose faith in media once you know that the same journalistic scrutiny is applied to the person at helm of NYT.

[uMeanPpl]

A man wielding so much power and influence I’ve never heard of them.

Start a campaign against them.

Oh that’s right it’s on everyone else to organize as you desire.

Paranoid delusions of the anti-social crowd is all this rambling adds up to.

[nindalf]

> that I’ve never heard of him

That’s my whole point, which flew right over your head. This is a man who has inherited power and influence. There’s no incentive for the NYT to investigate their own publisher + chairman. There seems to be little appetite for anyone else to do so either. So basically there’s no scrutiny of how he wields his power, or how nepotism is rife at the top of the NYT. That’s why you haven’t heard of him.

Do you understand now?

[uMeanPpl]

There’s no sense believing he has power and influence. I’ve never heard of him? What power and influence? What paper named NYT?

Do you understand how to deal with figurative displays of power? They’re not going to come after us if we actively promote the idea they’re actually weak and useless.

Turn public sentiment against the idea of ephemeral power and value stores.

[jollyllama]

The tweets are remarkably scant on details as to when this occurred. Unless it's just assumed that nothing older than a week is ever discussed, in the current zeitgeist.

[uMeanPpl]

Right sure no one on Twitter has an angle to push with vague statements

I mishear or take things out of context all the time. I’m sure this random Twitter person is not misremembering.

You’re being played emotionally.

[chrchang523]

This is incidentally a valid reason for HN to blacklist the NYT domain, at least until a formal reversal of the policy.

[lambdasquirrel]

The NYTimes has been hostile to tech for as long as I can remember, and my memory on the matter goes back to the 90's when Thomas Friedman was writing about how our jobs were going to India practically every other week. After Google had taken off, that stopped, and they changed their tone to some sort of embrace-and-extend.

It's been many many years of this. It's not going to change. The signal-to-noise ratio isn't going to improve. To that set of folks, we'll always be a bunch of picks and shovels. There's a subset of the liberal artsy crowd that will always see STEM as being lesser intellectually, and that's who these articles are written for. To be sure, that doesn't mean that STEM folks should be anti-liberal-arts. Folks on the engineering side need to own what that side of intellectual life offers, because you can bet that there'll be other (traditional-management-and-corporate) folks leveraging the liberal artsy side and learning what they can about tech so they can "manage" it. To which end, I would also consider this article a reminder and temperature read.

I'm indifferent if the narrative would drive away some talented students into other industries. Raw talent isn't all that there is. There were plenty of 10x programmers in the field before tech got big. And not everyone going into the big giants would be so good in a startup. If you ask me, there's other stuff at play, like the competition between programmers today, and the drive to climb the ladder above all else – those things more or less negate whatever benefit the bump in talent was, because those things don't help startups. Those things are much more readily harnessed by the truly big companies.

[mistrial9]

ten years before that, for readers in Palo Alto, NYT tech analysis of the PC world was the source of hilarity -- so out of touch.

[zeroonetwothree]

I thought Friedman is pro globalization?

[Eumenes]

Companies not in the 'tech' sector employ a sizable population of software developers and IT people. The average NYT reader may not know or understand this. People see "tech" and think of the Silicon Valley startup, with ping pong and the lavish perks. Average consumers of news generally have a negative view of these workers, because they get paid very well to "do nothing" and sit at a desk, plus the generous perks/benefits. You see this in any conversation involving housing too. Tech workers move to low cost of living areas and displace locals.

[alfiedotwtf]

> now that it's a tiny bit more difficult for the big tech companies to suck up all the oxygen in the room.

It's now well established that Software is Eating the World. This downturn is just Software taking a small break between meals.

[rayiner]

Par for course: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

It’s no surprise that after a decade of loose monetary policy, there’s a shakeout in capital-intensive industries like tech. That’s painful in the short term, but it’s a good thing overall. It’s necessary for capital to be better allocated across the economy.

[itsdrewmiller]

Tech is one of the least capital-intensive industries, no?

[rayiner]

Paying developers to build new products is a capital expenditure.

[zeroonetwothree]

Typically employees are considered operating expenditure, not capital expenditure.

[wmorgan]

The term of art is "capitalized labor." For example, this is from Microsoft's accounting policies:

> Costs incurred internally in researching and developing a computer software product are charged to expense until technological feasibility has been established for the product. Once technological feasibility is established, software costs are capitalized until the product is available for general release to customers.

Then later

> The amortization of these costs is included in cost of revenue over the estimated life of the products.

https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar21/index.html

[ehnto]

> I'm excited to see what new companies are going to form in the next few years now that it's a tiny bit more difficult for the big tech companies to suck up all the oxygen in the room

Here's hoping. Although it's market dynamics at work, I often wish that software developers (myself included) and related were paid a little bit more sensibly, so that other industries could afford to hire software developers and that smaller scale software became more viable.

I think there are plenty of companies that don't necessarily need to be "eaten by software", they could just do some cool stuff if only it were affordable to hire a developer. I mean bespoke programs that help the company do stuff. Make people's lives better kind of stuff, rather than making bucket loads of cash kind of stuff. It's also a really fun role, it has the fun of bespoke automation and problem solving while also being part of the community you live in. Those kinds of opportunities just don't exist now because no company would expect to afford a software developer.

I have a hard time articulating what I mean usually, I'm not a tech bubble hater, I just see opportunities elsewhere going unfulfilled because it wouldn't make the bucket loads of cash needed to pay for the developers at current market rates.

[uMeanPpl]

The expectation was tech is being juiced by cheap money and it was proven out.

None of the big tech CEOs except perhaps Cook, have presented a future vision to put people on. They’re making money with price increases and staff reductions. Tech deserves to be dumped on hard, as it was government funded socialism squandered.

They’re not superstars but typical middle managers. Being good with computers is not what it used to be in this economy.

What are all these laid of workers going to do? Start dotcoms? Been there, done that is not going to sway the public.

You live in a filter bubble.

[spywaregorilla]

the market values of big tech growth companies with no dividends did, to some extent.