Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by FartyMcFarter 1313 days ago
If you look at Meta, even after these layoffs they've grown by 17% per year since 2019. It's bad for the people affected, but if you look at the big picture it's hard to call this a crash for now.
3 comments

Can’t find the source but Hard Fork podcast said that after these layoffs Meta headcount is down to where they were in March THIS YEAR
It would not surprise me. Meta have been hiring like crazy this year. No wonder thet had to do layoffs. Just simple missmamgemnet where they hired too fast, nothing more.
I think remote made hiring easier by removing the constraint of office space.

I’m in the process of hiring a few hundred people - we’d never be this far down the funnel in 2019 because we’d be out of desks.

Also, IT and R&D has been likely impacted less than other departments like HR and recruiting.

There's no doubt that for the next few years we're not gonna see the levels of compensation raise we've seen in the last 24 months, but it's not "end of an era" rather than a correction imho.

It's not a recession, it's just two quarters of consecutive falling GDP. Screw what the textbooks say. It's only a correction.
GDP grew last quarter.
Yeah, but a few more disorganized unwinding events like ftx and things could keep correcting for a while to come.
Show us a macroeconomics textbook used in the US that says this.
From Boyes and Melvin, Macroeconomics, 8th edition, 2008, pg. 135:

>The official dating of recessions in the United States is the responsibility of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an independent research organization. The NBER has identified the shaded areas in the graph in Figure 1 as recessions and the unshaded areas as expansions. Recessions are periods between cyclical peaks and the troughs that follow them. Expansions are periods between cyclical troughs and the peaks that follow them.

>The NBER defines a recession as “a period of significant decline in total output, income, employment, and trade, usually lasting from six months to a year, and marked by widespread contractions in many sectors of the economy.” People sometimes say that a recession is defined by two consecutive quarters of declining real GDP. This informal idea of what constitutes a recession seems to be consistent with the past recessions experienced by the United States, as every recession through the 1990s has had at least two quarters of falling real GDP. However, this is not the official definition of a recession. The business cycle dating committee of the NBER generally focuses on monthly data. Close attention is paid to the following monthly data series: employment, real personal income less transfer payments, the volume of sales of the manufacturing and wholesale– retail sectors adjusted for price changes, and industrial production. The focus is not on real GDP, because it is measured only quarterly and does not permit the identification of the month in which business-cycle turning points occur.

It doesn't seem like we're done yet with interest rates. The more that happens the more the industry will chill.

Will variable rates mortgages and wealthy tech workers end up paying for the covid lockdowns and government excesses?

People are overwhelmingly in fixed rate debt this time, and lending standards tightened meaningfully after 2008. I wouldn't bet on that being a catalyst.

[edit] We're talking like 2-4% of originations have been ARMs from 2009 onward, vs. a peak of 35% in 2004-2007.

The issue is that people will be stuck for 5-10 years in their current house. There will be limited new construction and eventually remodeling will stop. Watch the numbers out of Home Depot and Lowes.
High income (rather than wealthy) people are going to be the ones paying for government.