[jeffbee]

It's because journalists are still big mad that the internet wrecked the newspaper business, therefore the news constantly reports lies about how the tech industry is collapsing. The more news you watch and the less personal contact you have with the industry, the more likely you are to believe that techies are jumping out of office windows in despair (hi, Mom).

[tayo42]

The job market is terrible, pay is stagnate and remote work is being taken away and the biggest companies despite profits are laying off large amounts of people. I don't think that's fud

[jeffbee]

I don't see how you can hold that this job market is "terrible" in a frame of reference of the last 50 years, unless you were born fully-grown in a vat exactly 4 years ago.

[tayo42]

Have you looked for a software job in the last few years?

It's worse then 10 years ago. Idk why everyone who comments on the job market only looks back to the covid year

[jeffbee]

No, and no individual person can rely on their personal experience to gauge the job market, including you. However if you wish to assert that it is currently more difficult to get a job as a software developer than it was in late 2015, aggregate data suggest this is false. Also, looking back a mere 10 years does not dispel the general impression that you lack context.

If you look at employment in, for example, NAICS 518 "Computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services" which is one of the larger BLS categories for our industry, the numbers are at all-time highs, having doubled since 2011. An example of a bad job market for software developers was 2001-2011, when this sector shrank by a third.

[tayo42]

Which numbers are at all time highs.

Is that really representative of what people mean by tech? Or does that include companies that happen to make software?

[parineum]

> the biggest companies despite profits are laying off large amounts of people.

Hi is the need for employees related to profit?

[tayo42]

The decision to layoff has side effects beyond net income on a balance sheet.

[parineum]

What's your point? If there's no work for 10k people to do, should companies just continue employing them to do... nothing?

[tayo42]

That's never how layoffs are done. If you survive them your workload just increases and the employees picked are based on nothing or something arbitrary.

Then your company has a reputation for being unreliable for stable employment and people that can pick where they want to go will go else where. It also kills morale and remaining high performers will go somewhere else. Now the company laying off is stuck with low performers that don't have other options.

[parineum]

Sounds like a recipe for bankruptcy. How many of these companies doing mass layoffs are going to go out of business?

[jeffbee]

One of SV's strengths is cutting your highly qualified and experienced staff loose to go do something else.

[parineum]

Is there something the the SV charter that says companies operating there must do that?

Nobody seems to want to answer the question so I assume nobody wants to confront that a company isn't the bad guy when it fires people it doesn't need. And, if it turns out it did need them, the company will suffer. Usually that doesn't happen though and so I tend to trust that these companies understand their business needs more than I do.

It sucks when people lose their jobs but if there's no job at their company for them anymore, their employer isn't a charity. Just like if a company could no longer afford to pay they employees, the employees shouldn't hang around and work for nothing. You might as well be demonizing people who file for divorce for making their partner single.