Don't you think that the ppl deciding to hire like crazies just to fire a year later should be accountable for that? They're clearly making bad decisions. It's just that someone else is expected to pay for them.
How many financially bad decisions you made in 2022?
Did you buy real-estate in 20/21 when the mortgate rates were 2%? If you didn't that's a terrible decision. Did you take responsibility and fire yourself as the primary bread-winner for your family? Why not?
Did you buy any high-growth tech stocks in 2021? If you did, that was a terrible decision.
> Did you buy real-estate in 20/21 when the mortgate rates were 2%? If you didn't that's a terrible decision.
Meh. Securing financing in 20/21 was great but buying in 20/21 was kind of terrible.
Everyone I know who bought during that time period is now stuck for 30 years because over-extended and took a bath on property value, and a lot of them are already regretting that choice as life returns to normal and they realize life in the outer suburbs is kind of miserable (especially as they RTO).
Conversely, refinancing and leveraging cheap cash in 20/21, building a pile of powder, and then waiting until 2023-2024 to buy looks like a much better move. At least in my local market, either prices are down significantly or the seller can't afford a lower price and the inventory just sits on the market.
Real Estate from 20/21 appreciated 20-30%. With leverage you'd see 100%-200% returns. You can always sell now and realize that gain. At the end of the day, however you look at it, it'll be one of the stupidest financial decision you've made and you should take responsibility for it
The 20-30% appreciation is in specific markets. Definitely not all markets. Several housing markets are already down from 20/21 highs and lots of markets are trending downward.
Again, securing financing in 20/21 was great but buying real estate at those prices wasn't great relative to alternatives.
If a mortgage was you only way to get leverage in 20/21 then you should've taken out a mortgage. But if you had other ways to get leverage at the lower rates -- eg taking out a line of credit on existing real estate or borrowing against assets -- other options have been performing better and especially over the next few years will continue performing much better.
What if it went the other way? The strategy you described is a silly gamble that could have resulted in bankruptcy. Read the book Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb for a treatise on why your thinking is wrong.
Your rebuttal, is exactly my point. Leaders make strategic bets all the time, especially in the tech world where you have to constantly take risks. Not all of them will come off and leaders have to shut-down / layoff people when bets fail.
I'm admonishing OP for cherry-picking the time when leaders made the wrong bet.
> Did you buy real-estate in 20/21 when the mortgate rates were 2%? If you didn't that's a terrible decision.
You need to make a good decision and learn more about the fact that what you pay for an asset (which is fixed forever) is typically much more important than the loan rate (which can be refinanced at lower rates). Also, overpaying for a house is a trap that cannot be unloaded no matter what the interest rate without bringing cash to closing while underpaying allows for an easy sale no matter how high the interest rate.
Who said that they weren't accountable? It's not just entry level employees getting laid off, but also senior ones, managers and executives. Salesforce got rid of 3 out of their 4 CEOs this year.
If you've ever worked somewhere where there's been layoffs, you'll know that of the remaining employees, all of the best people immediately start looking for jobs elsewhere. If management is so incompetent that they overhired or underperformed bad enough to lay people off, the writing is on the wall to jump ship. It can take years to repair the motivational and cultural damage caused by a layoff. Especially when paired with "soft" layoff behavior like mandating RTO and "performance" management.
I've definitely been through some layoffs where most employees said good riddance and moved on with life immediately, so I think there is definitely some variations in morale response.
It is one thing if the layoffs are at a startup running out of money, and another if layoffs are at a profitable company
Where is this magical "elsewhere" part where there would be no layoffs?
It's mind-boggling that we have raised a generation of people who are absolutely clueless about "Cost-of-Capital". It is worse than people not understanding democracy
> Where is this magical "elsewhere" part where there would be no layoffs?
Any company with competent management. That includes not cargo culting layoffs while turning a blind eye to the damage they cause to a company.
> It's mind-boggling that we have raised a generation of people who are absolutely clueless about "Cost-of-Capital". It is worse than people not understanding democracy
What's mind-boggling is that people think the cost savings from a layoff happens in a vacuum. There are definitely repercussions in terms of loss of productivity, increased employee churn, brand damage, increased difficulty hiring in the future, loss of operational knowledge...
Layoff are a sign of mismanagement. That has nothing to do with the "cost-of-capital".
So you have never created a bug in your life? Made a mistake?
Your statement is as naive as "A Production Bug / Latency is a sign of Incompetent Software Developer" Should we fire you as soon as you hit the first bug?
BTW, You have a fundamental misunderstanding of Cost of Capital
Tomorrow if your salary is cut by 50%, would you cut-down on extra expenses? Is that a sign of mismanagement from you?
I'm not sure if you replied to the right comment or not since I didn't say anything about firing engineers (or anyone).
My point is that over-hiring and layoffs aren't "good for the company" as the post I was responding to claimed. They're both a sign of bad management that incurs a cost on the company being poorly managed. One of those costs is that top performers leave as they are the first to recognize mismanagement.
Those people should be accountable for that, sure. But Matthew McConaughey isn't accountable for that. We don't know the terms of his contract -- just that his contract was better than that of at-will employees (which, of course it was. The contracts for executives are also better than those of at-will employees...that's how this works) -- and we don't know what all was included as part of it.
But even if paying a celebrity $10 million for endorsements is a bad decision (and we don't know if it is or if it isn't -- it's probably a wash, as most marketing expenditures like this are), that decision is unrelated to why 8,000 people were laid off.
Did you buy real-estate in 20/21 when the mortgate rates were 2%? If you didn't that's a terrible decision. Did you take responsibility and fire yourself as the primary bread-winner for your family? Why not?
Did you buy any high-growth tech stocks in 2021? If you did, that was a terrible decision.
Any idiot can arm-chair hindsight decisions