[mindcrime]

If I owned any Google stock right now, I'd be thinking hard about selling it. Not because everything here is silly, but just because:

A. over the course of 20+ years in this industry I've noticed a trend that when companies start worrying about things like tape dispensers or staplers (or the free coffee in the cafeteria, or the cost of the subsidized sodas in the breakroom, etc) it's almost always a Really Bad Sign for their future.

B. (related to A of course) when this stuff starts happening, it tends to send the best employees heading for the doors, either because they feel slighted, and/or because they assume (rightly or not) that the company is spiraling the drain. And the best employees leaving can have exactly the effect of sending the company spiraling down the drain...

These things have a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies (or at least self-reinforcing negative feedback loops). At best, it's vanishingly rare for this to be harbinger of anything good.

[r00fus]

In the past 20 years, how many times have we had a low interest rate? Now ZIRP is dead, the incumbency of the USD as the world reserve currency is not a certain thing anymore.

Your average company in average times, sure your heuristic makes sense. I'm guessing this will give many other companies the green light to cut back their perks as well.

Just a thought - where are all those "best employees" going to go? Everyone is battening the hatches for a recession and VCs don't have tons of cash to hand out for new startups.

[mindcrime]

Just a thought - where are all those "best employees" going to go?

The last time I looked there were almost 2 job openings per unemployed person in America. Unemployment right now is around 3.6% which is a slight uptick from other recent numbers, but still close to "historically low" territory. There are jobs out there.

Everyone is battening the hatches for a recession and VCs don't have tons of cash to hand out for new startups.

I would say it's a bit myopic to think that tech workers can only go to work for tech startups, or even companies that identify as "tech companies". So maybe somebody from Google winds up at John Deere, or Kohls, or Farmer's Insurance, or what-have-you. Now of course there's always going to be those people who have the mindset "I'm too good to work for company that makes tractors, pppffawwww." or whatever. So sure, they might not be rushing to leave unless the flood waters are literally swirling around their ankles. But clearly not everybody is going to fall into that category.

[beauzero]

This was the #1 lesson I learned from 2000 and the first dotcom bust.