Technology

Because they hired too many

Booming for the rich?

Because they’re greedy cunts and they want more profit.

It's a bunch of stuff.

The big companies all seriously upped their hiring game when COVID sent everybody work from home and all of a sudden a nice, cheap, workforce opened up all over the place. It's not that they're overstaffed at this point, but now that they can say look they're doing it over there too! The market's rough! A lot of big places have decided it's a good time to shed souls. They now have the opportunity to cut the more expensive people and the underperforming people, at the same time they get to increase their margins and improve their stock performance.

Interest rates are up so money's not free anymore (for the time being), advertising on the internet's getting harder due to legislation and public sentiment. SEO is getting harder. Everyone's dumping every available dollar they have into AI hoping to win big at buzzword bingo. Wages are starting to catch up to inflation they're paying more for what people they have. And honestly it's just an easy time for them to grab an extra couple of bucks.

A great number of the big guys probably are about to take a bath in corporate real estate.

There's also a another possible recession sitting around the corner. I believe there's already talk of the feds cutting rates again for a bit to try to side step it.

Honestly most of the stuff isn't really that new. But when Microsoft decides to do it, Google says hey that's a good idea let's do it! Everybody else is going to jump on board. Three - six months from now (assuming we're not mid recession) they'll probably be taking out billboards and reengaging bring a friend incentives again.

The answer is that in this context "Economy" means the stock price of billionaires' vested companies, not the prosperity of a common citizen (a.k.a peasant)

This corporate cycle isn't likely to change anytime soon right?

Top tier corps, boards, Cs, ultimately care about share price and growth right?

Isn't it tied to their pay incentives? To keep their contracts and incentives, they have to grow or reduce costs.

They make bad choices or bets among the way, no problem, just reduce costs and still meet the metrics. Only people who pay seem to be the workforce, right?

Or am I oversimplifying?

The US Economy is only booming for rich people.

The same reason everything costs more without there being inflation, greed and the never ending desire to make the line go up. At the end of the day that’s all a publicly traded company cares about. Line go up. They will do whatever they can legally, or hidden from legal scrutiny to make that happen.

They overhired during the pandemic adding to already bloated teams which could be made cost efficient during low prime-rate times. The tech job market is correcting back to proper levels. Schools and programs churning out new tech workers are contributing to this massively over populated job space.

I asked an executive this very question, and he said that the board was getting pressure from stock-holders to reduce headcounts, and justifying that pressure by pointing to other large companies who had already undertaken massive layoffs, and the resulting rise in their stock prices. In this way layoffs become a game of follow the leader -- or like a contagion. "Google just fired a third of their workforce, why are we doing that? We should do what they did, look how successful they are."

I wonder if it isn't a symptom of things going from high competition environment between new internet services and older stuff like cable to more established systems of revenue which don't have as much incentive to compete for workers or market share. So maybe that's the end result of approaching monopoly.

Let us also not forget that AI does not work. They made internal promises to themselves about how it was going to radically transform everything, within the next couple of quarters it seems, and when those "promises" did not materialize... the workers are the ones holding the bag (not "blamed", yet jobless all the same). So much irony at every single level. Like AI really will transform everything, but dayum give it a second will you?

In short: everything is performing fully normally, more's the pity:-(.

The layoffs are precisely why the “economy” is “booming”.

Schrodinger’s economy

Money isn't free anymore and they have a lot of debt

And

Elon broke the seal on firing huge swaths of a tech workforce to make your numbers look better.

Using out of touch metrics that say nothing about how the median household is doing is not helpful.

On the other hand if you measure by how much the shareholders are getting richer, the layoffs are exactly why the economy is considered booming. Record layoffs lead to record short term profits for the wealthy few.

Combined with billions in weapons being ordered and produced, oil producing competition being crushed, while gimping Europs growth. The Chinese hurting from the Evergrande debacle and the lithography embargo.

Plenty of reasons for the US as an entity to celebrate.

Laying people off is a way to juice the stock price in the short term. So perhaps the "economy is booming" because of the layoffs?

Even the state of the economy is spun these days. Who even knows at this point, depending who you ask and what factors you look at.

Blame AI and share prices.