This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO (though it is quite short so can be read in a minute or two).

> For years, companies like Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon hired too many developers. They knew they were hiring too many developers, but they did it anyway because of corporate greed. They wanted to control the talent pool.

Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off? Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries? Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?

It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition. Yes, they want to hire the best engineers they can find and they will pay handsomely for it. Every company (even our small non-profit) wants to hire the best engineers we can find. It's not "corporate greed" or us wanting to control the talent pool.

▲ ecb_penguin 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, all those things could be "corporate greed". Opposite actions in different environments don't change the intent.

> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever

It's an opinion piece about many of our shared experiences.

> blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees?

They explained their argument.

> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?

It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.

> Blaming corporate greed for causing high salaries?

They explained their argument in the article

> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?

It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.

▲ tickettotranai 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

If your framing is unfalsifiable, I question its utility.

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ffsm8 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Ultimately, all actions multinational companies take are rooted in greed.

Questioning that feels a lil naive?

Are you honestly of the opinion that big tech isn't primarily motivated by money and is instead being run like a family business with an upstanding owner that has the well-being of their employees at heart?

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wahern 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Being motivated by money isn't greed. Per Merriam-Webster, greed is an "excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed". The key qualifiers there are excessive and more than is needed. How do we determine what excessive employment is?

I'm not even sure how companies can be greedy. Many animals will gorge themselves on food far beyond what they "need" in the moment. There's nothing guaranteeing their next meal, so it's an adaptive strategy. In a competitive free market, growth is a survival strategy. Companies can and do die when their old sources of revenue decline and they failed to discover and grow new sources. Not only do they lose out on profits, but they have to fire employees. Avoiding or minimizing layoffs and the toll they take on lives is absolutely something many executives and managers have in mind, even at large corporations, when running a business.

We don't normally ascribe greed to animals, and it doesn't make much sense to do so for corporations, particularly commercial corporations. But to the extent we can equivocate the entity and the people who manage it, underlying motivations are mixed, complicated, and varied.

And I'd argue that not all corporations, even multinationals, are similarly aggressive and "ruthless", so clearly there are complex social dynamics beyond profit maximization. Corporations aren't moral agents in the same way we consider people, yet they're not pure profit maximizing automatons, either.

	▲	ryandrake 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Being motivated by money isn't greed. Per Merriam-Webster, greed is an "excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed". The key qualifiers there are excessive and more than is needed. How do we determine what excessive employment is? Turn it around. How do we determine what "enough" is? Ask any business person who is beholden to shareholders to define "enough" and they will tell you there is no such word.
	▲	Paratoner 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> How do we determine what excessive employment is? Idk perhaps we have a slight hint in the tens of thousands of workers Microsoft _alone_ has laid off in the past year? I'm sure there is no way to intuit that big tech has indeed been over hiring with a clear disregard for its individuals beyond their utility at fixed points in time.

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klik99 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, the parent comments feel confused, it's kind of a truism that corporations make decisions based on greed. Capitalism, at it's best, tries to align personal/corporate self-interest with the interests of society. If you can't beat 'em, try to direct their interest towards things that benefit society. Keyword here is "try", I mean it's better than feudal lords pursuing self interest by constantly killing each other. The article does a good job of showing how that drive has really made a mess of the job market, and criticizing it because it blames all this stuff on corporate greed is really confusing since both critics and proponents of capitalism agree corporate decisions are all driven by self-interest, they just disagree on the outcomes.

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tickettotranai a day ago | parent | prev [-]

If anything, I take corporate greed as axiomatic. Saying something happened because of it is stupid. There's no information in it.

And hey, look, turns out the article was AI slop generated to make the front page of HN.

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ahf8Aithaex7Nai a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How is this framing unfalsifiable? It is up to you to demonstrate that. Otherwise, I question whether you even understand what falsifiability means and why it is relevant.

	▲	tickettotranai a day ago \| parent [-]
		Something can be falsifiable without being false. F=ma is falsifiable but not false. With humanities stuff it's less clear cut, but I'm inclined to be skeptical of ideas that explain too many things. Falsifiability is relevant because I'm not saying the framing is wrong (I'm not even convinced it can possibly be proven wrong), I'm saying it's not very useful. In practice this has the same effect as me saying that "corporate greed" is axiomatic, so blaming it for things is like blaming water for flowing downhill. It would be much more productive to frame this as an example, say, of market failure. Or a discussion of short-term thinking, or lacking negative feedback. All would be interesting. PS: the author has now stated his post was AI slop written to make the front page of HN. I feel extremely validated.

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antonvs 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They're identifying a driving force, greed, behind a range of actions. That's no more "unfalsifiable" than the claim that gravity is variously responsible for objects falling, orbits, spherically symmetric bodies, and stars collapsing.

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afthonos 3 days ago | parent [-]

So what would be impossible to explain in a world where “corporate greed” is indeed what causes all these things? The answer can’t be “nothing”—or “corporate greed” doesn’t mean anything.

I can say, for example, that under gravity, an object will not accelerate upwards when entering else stays down; if you show me that happening, I either have to say gravity didn’t cause it, or that gravity is not what we thought it was (and we should probably get a new word for whatever it has).

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antonvs 2 days ago | parent [-]

Any corporate behavior that doesn’t lead fairly directly to increased share price, profit, revenues, or market share would qualify.

But in the American corporate model, corporations almost by definition don’t do muck of that, because there’s an entrenched belief that increasing shareholder value is their primary mission. Positions to the contrary, like https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v..., are not widely understood or accepted.

	▲	thelaxiankey2 a day ago \| parent [-]
		The argument your link suggests is legal, not empirical. Legally speaking, there is no mandate, and acting like there is is almost surely bad for society. So I don't disagree there. And as to the existence of exceptions, that is what makes humanities hard. Unlike physics, it is never all, it's always most, it's always shades and never direct. I use absolutist words in these discussions because it makes the points stick better, but I obviously do not mean them totally. I think corporations maximizing profit is the default, and so writing an op-ed about how corporate greed caused something to happen seems pretty dumb to me.

▲ gruez 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>> Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?

>It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.

>> Let me guess, if they started cutting salaries, that is also corporate greed?

>It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce salaries to survive? No. A company worth trillions cutting salaries because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.

So your logic is that it's "greed" to cut necessary expenses even if you can afford it? Does this extend to people? If some rich wall st banker decided to cancel his personal trainer because he realized that a group class basically does 90% of the job for half the price, is that greed? Or is there some sort of double standard against corporations?

	▲	lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Per the banker analogy, it'd be like if the banker hired all of the personal trainers so other bankers wouldn't have access to them, give most of them nothing to do because it turns out the banker only needs one, and then fire them all once the other bankers won't be able to hire them as easily, all without any regard for the impact this strategy has on the trainers' lives and without being upfront and honest with the trainers about the strategy. Yes, that's greedy.

▲ ttoinou 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

  It depends. A struggling company that needs to reduce workforce to survive? No. A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down? Yes, probably.

Is the argument against layoffs purely based on the stock market value of the company ? That sounds very reductive

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dietr1ch 3 days ago | parent [-]

Google's 2023 layoffs was pure for stock market as Google was pressured to do what everyone else was doing (like, no one got fired for buying IBM). After the layoffs the stock went up, and I remember people compiled data to try figure out the reasoning behind it without much success. It broke trust in the company and desire to work there, what for if the shareholders would be better off with the news of a new layoff? My manager who was doing a great job and took my team about 8mo to hire was laid off.

	▲	ttoinou 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, interesting. I meant the argument "they can afford it, they have enough money, look at the stock market", not "they are trying to save money and drive up their stock value"

▲ yyyk 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>A company worth trillions laying off en-mass because stock rates are down?

What happens when a company keeps redundant workforce? Ah, yes, 'Bullshit jobs'*. So there's no way to win here. Such pieces are much better understood from a class interest POV.

* Also longterm damage to the economy from unused workforce.

▲ netcan 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The hyperbole and cliche (corporate greed) makes this trashy, but let me fix it...

Big Tech firms with blockbuster products like adwords, aws, iPhone and whatnot... they are extremely profitable. So profitable that the basic business logic of "invest more in the money-maker" reaches reductio ad absurdum.

So yeah. A lot of talent is locked up where the salaries are highest. These have so much resources and talent thrown at them that it can start to get wonky.

If you are actually hiring up to the point where the marginal 300k engineer causes a net loss of output (not just profit)... you are well into territory that just sucks.

That kind of thing happens... and thats also where some of the highest salaries and best talent is.

That said... I think AI projects have been a steam valve. This was worse 5 years ago.

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bluetomcat 3 days ago | parent [-]

Big Tech drove us towards techno-feudalism. It's a wider social phenomenon and their hiring patterns for programmers are only one aspect of the problem. Small businesses are forced to do business on their platforms according to their rules, or else they go bust. Programmers are forced to learn their APIs, so that their "app" can live in their walled gardens. They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines. This is a huge opportunity cost to society - that talent could be doing great creative stuff for small and medium-sized businesses instead.

	▲	gruez 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		>Small businesses are forced to do business on their platforms according to their rules, or else they go bust. Programmers are forced to learn their APIs, so that their "app" can live in their walled gardens. ??? What are you talking about? For a typical fullstack app the proprietary bits probably account for less than 5% of the codebase. >They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines. That's just PR/advertising/sales. If the companies didn't exist it's not like those job or efforts will disappear, they'll be allocated elsewhere, classified ads in newspapers for instance.

▲ bigbuppo 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The article is something known as "a blog post" with a bunch of words known as "an opinion". It's not a thorough economic analysis from an economist using validated data sources and empirical research backed by strict scientific rigor that passes all peer review but can't be repeated.

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johnfn 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Are we not supposed to pass judgement on a blog post just because it's opinion-based? If I put the most nonsensical opinions into my blog post, I hope people tell me that it's not very good.

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freedomben 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't disagree, but I also don't think that gives the article a pass to make whatever claims they want without getting any pushback. Especially where they posted it to HN, they should be expecting to be challenged. I could (and probably should) have been nicer instead of calling it "terrible", but I don't think we (a site like HN dedicated to intellectual curiosity) should give bad claims a pass just because they are "opinion." We don't let journalists make unsubstantiated factual claims that are self-contradictory just because they listed it under the "opinion" section of the paper/site, and I don't think we should have different standards for a self-published piece. I'm not advocating censoring it or taking it down, I'm just critiquing it.

	▲	bigbuppo 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Where is your peer-reviewed research that shows your opinion on this is correct? Do you have the numbers to back that up? Is there any verified source of data that says, "I love it when the people of HN find my blog post and start screaming at me for shit that doesn't matter."

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szundi 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Parent commenter presents perfect arguments to show this opinion or whatever it is is based on questionable grounds

▲ sugarpimpdorsey 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> This is a really terrible article. I suspect the HN comment section will be good, but TFA is not worth reading IMHO

The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will.

It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?

Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.

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freedomben 3 days ago | parent [-]

> The "article" is just a blog post - an extended comment, if you will.

If you posted a comment on HN making huge claims with no evidence, it would be pushed back on. That happens constantly. You can say, "well, that's just like, my opinion, man" and that's fine, but I could easily say, "I think there's a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbiting the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars" and offer no evidence, and reply identically. Does that magically put my comment above criticism?

> It's no different than if you barged in here and told someone their comment was "terrible, but I'm sure the rest will be better". That would get you flagged, but how is that measurably different than what you said?

I agree my language was a little harsh and I could have been nicer. However, there are mountains of comments like "this is a terrible take" on HN comments all the time and they don't get flagged as long as they offer some justification (and otherwise follow the guidelines). If that was all I said, then that's a terrible comment and should be flagged, but I did offer some justification.

> Who are you to critique the author? You're not smarter than everyone else, I assure you.

Great point. So should I stop trying to think critically and just accept any opinion without questioning? Or is it just the discussion around it that offends you? What is the bar for critical thinking? 95th percentile in intelligence? 99th? Below that we should shut our brains off and accept whatever we see on the internet?

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sugarpimpdorsey 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

You can do all that without being dismissive and telling everyone the post "isn't worth reading" (while believing your comment is).

	▲	freedomben 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Fair, point taken. I concede my language was overly harsh. Was a bit of a hot take. I don't retract it, but I do think I could have been nicer.

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3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

▲ graemep 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Aside from all the claims with no sources/references whatsoever (claims which are not at all self-evident), blaming "corporate greed" for hiring employees? Isn't it also "corporate greed" to lay people off?

Both can be true depending in circumstances. The management of companies are primarily motivated by increasing their share price, as that is what remuneration is most commonly linked to, nor profits. For example, by options.

When things are good they will over hire to make future growth look at good as possible, to increase investor confidence.

When things are bad they will be focused on making numbers look better in the short term.

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freedomben 3 days ago | parent [-]

I don't disagree, but then it seems like the definition of "greed" that you are using is essentially synonymous with "running a company." If we want to use that definition, then the claims become true, but the term "greed" also becomes meaningless as it applies to everything we as humans do. "Greed" becomes the motivation behind why I took two slices of pizza instead of one, or why I turn the thermostat down in the winter to use less fuel (and thus save money), or why I turn the thermostat up in the winter (to get more comfortable, even though I'm using more gas). We greedily want to stay alive, so we use resources to procure food at the expense of other living creatures. For that matter, all life on the planet is driven by greed.

	▲	graemep 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I do not think it is synonymous. Running a company means pursuing profits, but it does not mean you have to ignore all other considerations. You can have ethical limits, server customers, look after the interests of your employees, reduce your environmental impacts etc. Greed means running a company without due consideration of these things. IN this case the explanation I am suggesting is even less synonymous because by putting short boosts to the share price over long term profitability is not (in the long term) even serving the best interests of the shareholders.

▲ danesparza 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed. This article doesn't even touch on other factors like tax law changes that influenced corporate hiring (specifically for software development teams). That seems like a glaring omission.

▲ benreesman 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

TFA is largely vibes, the angst it expresses is about real things but the analysis is to your point flawed in the details. Here's a better one.

The foundational technologies that have enabled the current high-cap pool of companies to wield disproportionate power in every aspect of modern life and escalate their influence with each successive administration to the point where in 2025 that Inaugeration seating is a caricature of gilded-age trust kleptocracy were developed in robust public-private partnerships funded by a combination of the DoD, ATT / Western / the Labs, NASA, the University system and grants. The taxpayer bought a technology lead over the rest of the world with tax dollars.

This gigantic pile of wealth in everything from semiconductors to software has been getting privatized by a handful of companies for coming up on 40 years in the more extreme cases, some newer entrants about 20 years ago. This materializes as things that used to belong to everyone (ARPANet becomes the Internet, big free democratic thing) getting captured, controlled, and treated like the personal property of a small number of feudalist organizations masquerading as publicly traded companies on a stock market (dual-class share structures that have shared and market caps but no shareholder governance would be a good example).

This group of people has had one nasty thorn in their side: their most scarce input was elite engineers, a notoriously prickly bunch as concerns unaccountable authority, and having this group of people as a key input led to both considerable pricing power in the hands of someone else, and being at the mercy of a weirdly principled group of people who don't necessarily share the agendas of a Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg.

Thus, this cabal has run headlong into multiple rounds of prosecution by the Federal Department of Justice, who incidentally has to decide that something is serious enough to take limited resources off of chasing drug dealers and terrorists. They were most recently successfully prosecuted in 2012.

In 2025, engineers everywhere are pretty pissed off about a pretty clearly bogus cover story that's really about this group of companies/lifetime-CEO-boy-kings trying again in a time friendlier to law-buying and other sanctioned law-breaking to break the back once and for all of one of the last truly upwardly mobile professions in the United States.

There. FTFY.

	▲	freedomben 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Definitely a much better article :-) I largely (maybe entirely) agree with your analysis. I also have a large amount of anger against big tech for many of these things and think they more than deserve the criticism. Just how they've steered the internet toward their own control is enough to fill me with rage. That's before I go off on a rant about how they are locking down devices and treating the users (ostensibly the device "owner" as a primary security threat). That said I wouldn't describe what you described as "greed" but there's plenty of room for equivocation over that (and to be clear, you didn't use the word greed even once and aren't depending on it, so the previous point is more about TFA). Appreciate the discussion!

▲ ManlyBread 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>This is a really terrible article.

I am coming here less and less because it's either the AI spam or low quality blogposts like these, with very few worthwhile articles in between.

▲ ponector 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I also don't buy this argument. They can control talent pool in some locations. But globally, their workforce is a drop in a bucket. I bet one TCS is bigger than all FAANGs by body count.

▲ at-fates-hands 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not buying the idea that "corporate greed" led to over hiring to control the labor market. In fact, if the companies were really greedy, they would only hire the LEAST amount of developers and actually increase their bottom line and ergo, more profit for their shareholders. Which makes far more sense then expanding your overhead which actually reduces the amount of money your company profits.

▲ rozap 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Volatility caused by short term thinking is bad for workers. Over hiring and layoffs are a symptom of that.

That being said, yes the article is just a rant. But that doesn't mean it's wrong generally. I think it ascribes a bit more intent than was actually present. I think big tech is more like a school of fish than an elite cabal of serious thinkers.

▲ j45 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Over hiring junior talent to keep talent off the market away from competitors was a known behaviour as well.

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AnimalMuppet 3 days ago | parent [-]

Well, it was a widely and strongly suspected behavior. It was never proven, to the best of my knowledge.

	▲	j45 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, seems like a behaviour that increased during ZIRP and started reversing when that went way. At the least it might have been let people grow as much as they can because the money's so cheap, maybe anything is better than nothing. It's too bad though where junior devs couldn't get access to senior mentoring capacity that might have been needed.

▲ johnfn 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Corporate greed" is a thought-terminating cliché. Why did "corporate greed" start happening all of the sudden? Why did those companies overhire, and why aren't they doing that any more - did the corporate greed go away? I suspect that what OP nebulously refers to as "corporate greed" is actually multifactorial - a behavior determined by a complex interaction of incentives and factors. Someone else mentioned tax law changes, which is an obvious one. Can we think of more?

	▲	bryan_w 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Cost of capital

▲ neuroplots 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

TFA is simplistic and combative, but not entirely incorrect. When companies are cash-rich, they hire generously but invest in vanity projects that do nothing for the careers of the people staffed in them. When they’re poor, they fire people and use the fear factor to extract even more work.

This all said, it makes no sense to attack corporate greed without using the C word: Capitalism. Corporations do exactly what their owners designed them to do.

▲ nullc 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> It's not possible to "control the talent pool" when there are so many companies in competition.

I mean, for years Apple, Google, and others illegally colluded to rig wages... though I suspect the author was referring to the period of time after that as wages didn't skyrocket until the wage fixing ring collapsed.