[calderknight]

I think the companies have employees to try to make more money. When things are going really well in the economy it's easy for employees to create/capture lots of value, so the companies hire lots of employees to do that. But when the economy slows down a bit, suddenly it's a lot more difficult for employees to create value, so it doesn't make sense not to reduce the number of employees.

[onlypositive]

Yup, this is basically it.

My team at work hasn't created any meaningful value in a year. We've shipped nonstop but the things were tasked to work on just don't work out or even if they are well received simply don't add up to our salaries.

[dehrmann]

This is going to get a lot of hate, but the common refrain about WFH is "my productivity is up." That might be true, but it doesn't mean you're producing the right things, and I've found that harder to do remotely.

[Supermancho]

No hate at all. The vast majority don't control what they are told to do. WFH has nothing to do with it.

[bart_spoon]

What does this have to do with WFH? The point is that teams are tasked with meaningless projects, which they deliver on, but because the project was meaningless, they get axed for not producing value. They were doomed from the start, due to the strategic initiatives management mistakenly decided they should work on. This is occurs for both WFH and in person work.

[dehrmann]

My theory is it's harder to be critical of meaningless projects and align on what's meaningful when remote.

[onlypositive]

Not really, we keep moving from project to project because we're discovering no value in the initiative or it's outcomes after testing things out.

It's not necessarily failed management, it's just the nature of big tech. You have the OG money maker. Then you have all the other stuff to try and continue to grow or expand revenue streams.

It's fine in a good economy and hopefully you get a few big wins in amongst all the failures (think of it like vc / angel funding).

But in a downturn those excess experiments are weighing you down when you just need to stay afloat to the next upturn.

[BearOso]

The problem here is increasing growth. That's unsustainable. Having growth is already a linear positive. Companies seek to continuously increase growth to placate shareholders, but that's a magnitude greater, quadratic.

Eventually you simply can't keep increasing. In a panic to keep up the in short term, companies are cutting their lifelines. This is just leading to failure.

[sokoloff]

Or, so long as revenue growth is increasing (first and second derivative being positive), companies are inclined to pour on as much fuel on as they think they can productively use.

Once the second derivative turns negative, they are naturally much less interested in keeping the gas turned all the way up, so they trim back on spend.