| ▲ | throwmeaway222 6 days ago |
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| ▲ | hashstring 5 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| > getting rid of 80% of twitter showing every CEO that at least half the staff is sleeping The company also dropped 80% in value [1]. I don’t think Musk his value destruction at Twitter is that inspirational. [1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-... |
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| ▲ | Obscurity4340 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Pretty sure SA (arabia) and many other oppressive regimes consider it a steal [wink] | |
| ▲ | littlecranky67 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Value is what others are willing to pay. Ever since twitter is not publicly traded, it is not for sale. Any "estimations" by third parties are to be taken with more than a grain of salt. | | | |
| ▲ | s_ting765 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Pretty sure this is outdated news. | |
| ▲ | AbstractH24 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Musk destroyed 80% of Twitter's value, but the ROI was great for his personal brand (like it or not). And that's what buying it was really about. | | |
| ▲ | hashstring 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I agree to some extent, but that’s a completely different point than I made. The point I made is that firing 80% of the workforce was not showing other CEOs that that is such a value generating move (as the person above me implied). |
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| ▲ | daxfohl 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Betting on AI would be "hire some AI engineers and see what they can do", not "get rid of some engineers and see what happens". I think what you mean is "scapegoating AI". I think there's also a pinch of "we've run out of ideas / high margin projects" or "we're tired of funding 'platform 2.0' projects that end up creating more problems than they solve". But generally I agree with your assessment. Especially the Musk effect I think gets underplayed. |
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| ▲ | SkepticalWhale 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Betting on AI could mean a pause on hiring junior developers while we wait to see how AI plays out, though. |
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| ▲ | mertleee 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 30% fraudulent H1b, TN, and PERM visa mills (predominantly from india). |
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| ▲ | Tade0 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 10% Hiring Andrei instead of Andrew As one of the Andreis: they already had us all working for them a long time ago and with fertility rates as they are (and have been for three decades now) around here, there's hardly any new talent to choose from. Also we got hit with job cuts all the same. For instance, my team is currently working half its usual hours per week. It's not enough to cover all my family's expenses, but I was actually anticipating a layoff, so I count my blessings. |
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| ▲ | com2kid 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| While working at HBO Max (200 engineers at launch of the original product) I talked to a recruiter at Disney+, where I was informed they had 2000 engineers. So yeah, 80% sounds about right. :( Since that time HBO Max was acquired into an org that was an order of magnitude larger. I was downsized out when they cut 20% or so off, but honestly they could have cut another 40% and been Just Fine if the architecture and infrastructure had been built properly. |
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| ▲ | tuesdaynight 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Do you think that the architecture was built properly or was it rushed? I'm curious about your experience working there. Speaking as an user, HBO Max is the worst streaming service that I've used, by far. Errors happening frequently, basic features missing, etc. I don't expect Netflix level from the start, just the basics being covered. | | |
| ▲ | com2kid 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I worked on the original infra, pre merger. The backend stuff was super stable. My team had ~3 on call incidents across 3 years. The front end and catalog systems had more issues. The front end basically used an in house system that was the same idea as react native but originally built before react native, and it was never given enough engineering resources so it kind of hobbled along. The other issue is that we had to support a lot of different platforms, and some used the in house system, some used bespoke systems, and one used screens rendered on a server farm streamed to the underpowered set top boxes because those boxes were complete pieces of trash. The backend stuff was all amazing though, best dev ops tooling I've seen so far in the industry. True CI/CD, teams deployed to prod multiple times a day w/o issue. |
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| ▲ | Apocryphon 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| General post-COVID economic malaise (might just be ZIRP end in response to inflation). General greater economy malaise over tariffs |
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| ▲ | keeda 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Also offshoring, which ramped up after COVID, probably because companies realized remote work can work at scale. > 25% musk (getting rid of 80% of twitter showing every CEO that at least half the staff is sleeping) That was just a signal to the rest of the capital class that the labor class had gotten too big for their britches and needed to be shown their place. Twitter and all other companies that followed his lead have devolved into toxic cultures due to fewer staff being burdened with more work and asked to "be scrappy" and "do more with less." |
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| ▲ | guluarte 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| my guess: 90% because inflation and the fed rates. |
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| ▲ | echelon 6 days ago | parent [-] | | That and IRS section 174. | | |
| ▲ | jfactorial 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | TL;DR: recent changes in Section 174 IRC will _incentivize_ R&D spending, not cause layoffs of researchers and developers. Section 174 allows businesses to deduct their domestic R&D expenses. In 2017 Trump made businesses have to amortize these expenses over 5 years instead of deducting them, starting in 2022 (it is common for an administration to write laws that will only have a negative effect after they're gone). This move wrecked the R&D tax credit. Many US businesses stopped claiming R&D tax credits entirely as a result. Others had surprise tax bills. Trump's second term work is now to undo the disaster he caused (S.O.P.). Congress has reversed the amortization rule and businesses can again deduct R&D expenses immediately. This is a good thing rolling back a bad thing. The bad thing might have been responsible for layoffs a few years ago, but it will have only positive impact on 2025. | | |
| ▲ | echelon 5 days ago | parent [-] | | To be clear: the Section 174 changes that took effect in 2022 were disastrous and absolutely contributed to the layoffs. BBB reverses the changes for years 2025-2029 (what happens after that, who knows) and provides retroactive relief to small businesses under a certain income cap. Large businesses can accelerate amortization, but remain impacted for those years. |
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| ▲ | Apocryphon 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | And now, economic uncertainty due to tariffs | | |
| ▲ | throwmeaway222 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I would say tariffs would probably account for less than 0.1% of tech layoffs. That does have some effect, but honestly, things shift so quickly. You'll more likely find that goods are going to be dumped into third countries and then make their way over. There are many hacks being deployed no one will feel tariffs for a while. |
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| ▲ | pzo 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| also (affected mostly startups): - collapse of Silicon Valley Bank - section 173 |
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| ▲ | tasty_freeze 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Do you really think that companies were hiring that many unqualified people for DEI reasons? Just about every time the subject came up there were people saying it was just lip service and theater -- put a DEI statement on your company's public-facing webpage and pretend they actually did anything. |
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| ▲ | leetrout 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Maybe. I had two different hiring managers in two different companies explicitly tell me and others to hire women or PoC. Yes it was illegal. No one cares. | | |
| ▲ | IX-103 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yep. It's much easier to improve your DEI metrics by doing it illegally than it is by doing it legally. I had an internship at a place like that and the first disabled woman of color to apply would have been practically guaranteed a job. Needless to say I didn't end up working there after the internship - if they're willing to break labor laws just to improve metrics then what's stopping them from trying to cheat their employees. | |
| ▲ | kenjackson 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What do you mean by PoC? Because PoC hiring barely budged during the "DEI era" -- unless you meant Indian/Asian PoC. For example at Google over that 10 year era (from 2014 to 2024) Black+Latino hiring by 6% points. Indian/Asian increased by almost 15%. | | | |
| ▲ | fennecfoxy 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, even in my current job we don't explicitly hire for DEI type initiatives, but there is the general sense that we want to retain as many female or PoC staff as we can and we'd potentially go "above & beyond" for that. | |
| ▲ | ajsnigrutin 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | thrance 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Hating on minorities is nothing new, and has always been a powerful political driver. DEI is just another thing to direct that hate to, it doesn't matter what it actually is or does. Also, establising a link between DEI, a vague group of very mild and mostly ineffectual incentives, and the rise of right wing ideology is really dumb. No one would care about DEI if it hadn't been made a major talking point by right wing propagandists. If DEI didn't exist it would be something else that would "turn young men to the right". Don't fall for such basic propaganda. The war on these supposedly unfair hiring practices is being led by rich heirs that never did an honest day of work in their entire lives. Those disenfranchised young men buying the hate are made to turn against their own interests by the very same ones that fucked their opportunities in the first place. | | |
| ▲ | ajsnigrutin 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | thrance 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Only a fool would think MAGA stands for equality and against discrimination. Just thinking about it makes me laugh. I wish the anti-DEI folk was honest and stopped hiding behind "ending discrimination" when they have proved times and times again that they are all extremely confortable with other, far worse forms of it. | |
| ▲ | jachee 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I know HN is gonna downvote me into oblivion for this, but… I’m a cis-het white dude, a this rings true for me: “When you’ve been in the majority for a long time, equality can feel like oppression.” Just because a system desires proportional representation does not mean it’s discriminatory against the majority. It just means it’s no longer preferential toward them. | | |
| ▲ | entrox 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If the system values proportional representation higher than qualification, than I will either abandon my own strive towards excellence or I will actively support changing that system. I feel the latter option is more likely than abandoning something that is often shaping one's own identity | | |
| ▲ | jachee 5 days ago | parent [-] | | The system should value qualification higher than other factors. But the system is made up of people with inherent biases that has led to imbalanced representation of the majority over actual qualifications. You can strive for excellence and equality at the same time. It’s not zero sum. | | |
| ▲ | ajsnigrutin 5 days ago | parent [-] | | In my country, in high school, you get grades and at the end you have a standardized test. Colleges decide what ratio will be used (and if any special requirements are needed), and in most cases it's 60% standardized test results, 40% grades + some formula to turn that into 0-100 score. This is known well in advance, before even applying to the college. College has 150 open spots, 230 people apply, 20 fail the last year of high school, the other 210 are put on a ranked list by the points they've achieved, at 150th place "a line is drawn" and that's the cuttof for who gets accepted and who doesn't. They just publish "86.5 points needed to be accepted", and you can do the math at home and don't have to wait for the post to arrive. How is that not equal? It has worked since literally the commie times. |
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| ▲ | beeflet 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | kenjackson 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Is it? Almost all outcomes favor the majority. How many straight white males actually think they would have better life outcomes being born black female gay? Even with affirmative action, that only impacts a very small percentage of people at a very narrow window of time. | | |
| ▲ | beeflet 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Why is it the job of private institutions to regulate the life outcomes of key political demographics? Private institutions have the job of selecting the best candidates, and they don't have the right to discriminate against any candidates on the basis of race. In one breath, supporters of affirmative action in this thread will deny that such discrimination exists, and in the other they will justify its existence. Clearly you must acknowledge on some level that it's not really defensible. | | |
| ▲ | kenjackson 4 days ago | parent [-] | | It’s a great question. And I think we are in a bit of a pickle as not doing something is just acting in the opposite way to regulate life outcomes. It’s like gerrymandering districts and then when people want to move things back to a more normal partition you say “let’s just leave things as they are and not tinker”. But you’re now just advantaging the group that tinkered last. |
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| ▲ | jachee 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | When the system is dominated by the majority, and has been for a long time, a correction requires being “discriminatory against the majority”. “The system” itself was incorrect before. This is why it’s called systemic racism/sexism/etc. | | |
| ▲ | ajsnigrutin 5 days ago | parent [-] | | But the kids applying to colleges today had nothing to do with the history. A white (or asian) boy won't get accepted to his chosen college because of something he had no influence on, be it "history" or his skin color and gender. Is collective punishment of kids for something they had nothing to do with really the answer? | | |
| ▲ | jachee 5 days ago | parent [-] | | This thread is specifically about jobs, where people are specifically evaluated on an individual basis. University admissions are a whole different discussion, but are broken in similar ways. |
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| ▲ | lelanthran 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > No one would care about DEI if it hadn't been made a major talking point by right wing propagandists. That's a circular argument (post hoc ergo propter hoc/begging the question). It also sounds backwards. This is how your argument sounds to me: 1. DEI is made into a major talking point by right wing propagandists 2. How do you tell if someone is a right wing propagandist? They make DEI a major talking point. This is backwards! Politicians adjust their messaging for the most votes[1]. TBH, this whole talking-point mess was not completely made up. The politicians aren't creating talking points and then trying to convert people, they are adjusting their talking points to what matters to the voters. If DEI didn't matter, and we weren't constantly under a barrage of "If you disagree you're a nazi", the Trump campaign would have found something else to make one of the major talking points. =================================== [1] Well, the Trump does, anyway. The major difference I, as an outsider, saw between the two parties in the most recent presidential election was in the adjustment and delivery of messaging. The Left's message was "This is what we stand for. You need to fall in line in order for us to win". Trumps message was "This matters to you? Okay, then it matters to me too". It's not hard to see that one of those are backwards. | | |
| ▲ | thrance 5 days ago | parent [-] | | My arguments is not what you're making it up to be, at all. It's: 1. DEI is made into a major talking point by right wing propagandists. 2. DEI suddenly becomes a core issues for right wing voters. Conservative politicians didn't adjust their messaging to address what matters to the voters, they made up an issue to galvanize hate against minorities and turn it into political goodwill. It's like the Jews under nazi Germany (but far, far less extreme). DEI/Jews aren't actually making that much of a difference in society, they're just a convenient scapegoat to point to and command hate from the masses. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... As for your note: yes, the democrats are severly lacking in the populism area. But don't mistake Trump's populism for any actual interest in voters' issues. After all, only a fool would think MAGA stands for equality and against discrimination. |
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| ▲ | nomel 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > why AfD is on the rise Except for the 6 that just died, right before a local election [1]. [1] https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-afd-ca... | | |
| ▲ | humpty-d 6 days ago | parent [-] | | No mention that 2 candidates from other parties died in the run up. Or that it's out of 20,000+ individuals contesting various seats. No mention that they are mostly 59+ years old with preexisting health conditions. Luckily it gives us the most critical bit of info we could ask for, that Musk tweeted "!!" In summary this article is shit. | | |
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| ▲ | strken 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you rephrase "ending DEI" to "reducing the risk of getting sued when laying off x% of staff", does it make any more sense? Nobody knows how to actually hire competent staff because it's a constantly changing bar: if you give people leetcode, they start cramming leetcode; if you review their GitHub profile, they start spending disproportionate amounts of time on projects; if you give them take-homes, they spend 5x the recommended time; if you give them real-world problems in a timed interview, that's probably harder to game, but some candidates will send a completely different person along. On top of that, some people just interview really well but aren't good 9 to 5. At a big enough company, you've always got a list of people who you incorrectly hired and want to get rid of. DEI is a minor barrier to doing that for some cohorts. It's not that you hired incompetent people in XYZ groups to bump up your diversity numbers, it's that you hired incompetent people in every group and now you're unable to get rid of some of the ones in XYZ. Also, let's not forget that some people are just genuinely sexist and/or racist and/or whateverist, either consciously or unconsciously. What happens when those people aren't held back by HR as strongly? | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't think it's as big of a factor as the parent comment, but I witness a lot of extremely weird DEI related hiring things in 2020-2022. C-level executives would flag certain job openings as only eligible for women or minorities. I clearly remember a meeting where our CTO declared that he had rejected an extremely qualified male candidate because "we have enough of those". When some people complained they started hiding the details, but it was still obvious. There would be hiring rounds where the only candidates coming from HR were dozens of women for a specific role. After interviewing all of them and giving several second chances we couldn't find anyone qualified in that batch of candidates, so there was a very tense meeting where we were heavily pressured to just pick one. You could tell a lot of the candidates involved in this process were catching on and/or being pandered to and they really didn't like it either. | | |
| ▲ | tibbon 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I hate to admit it, but I saw similar things. I referred someone incredibly qualified for a Chief of Staff role at a company. Their resume was well beyond what the company could have hoped to find. The executive recruiting firm was over the moon with him. However, they basically told him that this company was looking for a 'more diverse background' and as a straight white guy, he wasn't it - but they were excited to take him around to other clients. For a few years, the hiring process seemed broken overall, and in retrospect, it didn't do much to actually help the people it claimed to. I'm all about strength from diversity, but you can't throw away everything to get there. | |
| ▲ | Ekaros 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I hope you forwarded that CTO's documented order to candidate so appropriate action could be taken. |
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| ▲ | NothingAboutAny 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Only anecdotally I can tell you when I was at a medium sized (~200 employee) fintech business in Australia, I was told by my engineering manager to hire any woman or PoC that applied.
but in my 2 year tenure I think only 1 of either applied, both were hired immediately. | |
| ▲ | humpty-d 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I've had like 10x more pressure lately to hire cheap contractors from India than I ever did to hire a woman or black guy at any point in my 10 years of hiring in this field. | |
| ▲ | StanislavPetrov 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >Do you really think that companies were hiring that many unqualified people for DEI reasons? Depending on what industry you are in, absolutely. I can offer one anecdote that I can personally attest actually occurred. (though I was not the protagonist). There was an opening for a new, salaried, full-time faculty member after the unfortunate death of the previous position holder. During the hiring discussion at a staff meeting at this (private) NYC college the Dean stated, "we aren't hiring or promoting any more straight white men". They said this openly, and without shame, in front of a room full of people including a well-credentialed adjunct (who happened to be a straight, white man) who had worked there for several years, without an annual contract or any of the accompanying benefits. And, in fact, they ended up hiring a completely unqualified black, LGBTQ woman for that position. The woman was so unqualified and out of her depth that she stopped showing up entirely just a month into the semester. The passed-over adjunct tried to file an EEOC complaint but was told (rightly or wrongly) that since he wasn't part of a protected class he didn't qualify. For the next several years, of the ~10 people that were hired or promoted at this NYC college, none were straight white men. |
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| ▲ | hexator 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's sad this racist crap is so upvoted here... |
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| ▲ | goldenchrome 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | What’s racist about it? | | | |
| ▲ | theonething 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | making the serious accusation of racism without offering any justification for the claim ain't so great either... | | |
| ▲ | hexator 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The original comment implied that white people were losing jobs to non-white people (it has since been deleted by HN) | |
| ▲ | fennecfoxy 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | In fact using racism, homophobia claims inappropriately/as a weapon to shut down or turn conversation your way is despicable, imo. They never did DEI as for me as a gay man anyway, only for women & PoC. |
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| ▲ | pera 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Dog whistling is trendy and celebrated nowadays, specially around tech bros: they fucking love it |
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| ▲ | thenayr 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
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