@mhoye I am shocked, SHOCKED, there's gambling going on in here!

@mhoye do you remember around the time the layoffs started, there was a letter going around from a London hedge fund basically urging a company (Google?) to do this in order to “correct the market” or something. I forget the exact wording

@mhoye an economist was wrong? [surpisedPikachu.jpg]

@mhoye anyone claiming social contagion, with a straight face, doesn't have a clue about how powerful people collude to remain power.

@mhoye
Early this year the CEO of Salesforce said he was being pressured by hedge funds to lay off employees

@mhoye doesn’t this describe illegal collusion to suppress wage growth? Something tech companies have been dinged for in the past…

@mhoye

This kind of shit is why tech workers desperately need to unionize across the industry! The CEOs are absolutely unioned against us already, we have the receipts and we have the suppressed wages too!

They're replacing senior devs with complex inside knowledge of their business by bootcamp grads for 1/4 of the pay, and the trend of it has enshittified the entire Internet to the point where the whole system is collapsing!

When will collectively put down our keyboards and demand better?

@mhoye @talon Meanwhile, if someone were to suggest the US government is encouraging and assisting millions of people to annually cross the southern border to depress wages during a time of high inflation, they'd call you names and demand you be deplatformed for spreading conspiracy theories and daring to question the motives of our benevolent corporate masters.

@mhoye tysm for the article. Reminds me of this:
https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon-valley/#:~:text=In%20the%20mid%2D2000s%20there,other%20firms%20to%20join%20them.

@mhoye What?!?!?! No.... They would never...

*clutches pearls, looks for a fainting couch* 🙃

@mhoye

yeah, CEOs have said as much,

https://theintercept.com/2023/09/23/tim-gurner-speech-unemployment/

@mhoye kind of also demonstrates that these were bullshit jobs to begin with. Does it matter if this work gets done? Nah, the real money is made when the ownership class goes to the market and puts everything on black

@mhoye What a shock! Corporate elites operating from short-term, narrow self interest. Sympathy is after all, a form of suicide to the typical CEO.

@mhoye unions. This is why they are needed.

@mhoye I would agree (I have been made redundant a few times - it sucks).

And when it becomes difficult, when times are testing, having loyal staff, who know that they will be protected by the company, is what will make the difference.

It convinces me more and more that those in charge of most of the larger companies are fundamentally incompetent at running a business.

@mhoye I wouldn't be surprised if the guy who wrote this up was a low level AV tech, with better insight than the collective brainpower of some of the world's most successful tech executives.

@mhoye Everyone but Apple, that is. Not enough mismanagement to cover up there?

@mhoye unsurprisingly unsurprised

@mhoye
How this isn’t outlawed yet???

Can’t a general attorney act on this, to preserve general interest, common good and public rights???

If you still needed a proof that that particular country is an undemocratic oligarchy, there you go…

@mhoye you mean to tell me having the same 100 people on a bunch of the boards with 2 major financial firms ( Black Rock Vanguard) connected the majority of our economy is bad for regular people?

@mhoye I'm always surprised whenever people talk about layoffs and forget to mention the Great Recession we've been under for the past 16 years.

Companies are hurting so they resort to fake hiring in order to pretend that they're growing. This ends up leading to layoffs.

What we need to do is think outside the box to get us out of this economic recession. It's not going to take votes. Dems & Reps are blinding the American people. It's going to take bold decisions on business leaders' parts.

Since this post is making the rounds again I want to re-up this part:

@mhoye I miss MiniMicrosoft

@mhoye wow its almost like tech workers should unionize or something.

@mhoye @aral FWIW, my experience in a VERY legacy industry is that, in plush times, some execs empire-build, think because they have 700 reports, they are Big Men or Women. Then, come more constrained times, call in McKinsey. ZIRP in the Valley does not seem materially different.

@mhoye <It always has been astronaut meme>.

I feel like layoffs has never not been about poor management. I guess the new part is the coordinated part.

@mhoye think of the money companies could save if CEO's are replaced with AI.

@mhoye I'm pretty sure any coordination over an industry counts as cartel behavior. Last I checked, that was hella illegal.

Edit: Which is to say I feel there should be grounds for repercussions here.

@mhoye This is my shocked face: 😶

@mhoye I can't believe!

@mhoye “When a few firms fire staff, others will probably follow suit. Most problematic, it’s a behavior that kills people: For example, research has shown that layoffs can increase the odds of suicide by two times or more.”

@mhoye my company's exec said this at yesterday's all-hands: "We made the company a little smaller last fall. We're beginning to grow again to fill that void."