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by grok22 1241 days ago
Interesting way to look at it. It certainly makes sense that companies hire to capture intellectual output when money is cheap and then tighten spending when access to easy money goes away even if they are making money hand-over-fist in their business.
2 comments
brandall10 1241 days ago
I think by and large it comes down to appeasing shareholders.

If there is a chance that predicted quarterly metrics are impacted, this type bloodletting acts as a hedge. The whole "we understand we're not where we said we'd be at and as a result we're cutting costs".

The issue of course is this is short-sighted thinking.

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untilNxtwk 1241 days ago
Yeh. The entire org has to rethink what progress means with such cuts and that takes time, which impacts deadlines.

We’re far too controlled by the short term anxiety of investors. Financiers need to learn more about how the physical world works and not just fetishize abstract math conveniently labeled in politically correct tradition.

The burden should be on finance to prove its value and not be allowed to leverage recent history when the market could only go up as the post-WW2 world was a crater. Other countries have caught up and don’t have to play by the US’s old rules. Why should the next generation within the US? People who lucked into winning have an extraordinary burden of proof their success wasn’t just being born in a time-place.

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untilNxtwk 1241 days ago
It certainly challenges the genius tech CEO story when they’re all just copy-pasting each other.

None of the software CEOs are charting a net new course for tech manufacture; they’re just managing data center footprint that host vapid content.

The older crowd is aging away and the younger crowd that grew up with a Gameboy in their face, not WSJ, can start making their own content with ML (like I am).

The emotional temple that is social media is not interesting to the next generation as they know how to Docker pull Twitter and the like into existence. It’s a solved problem from an engineering perspective. We’re bored serving politically correct capitalist memes.

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