This week Spotify, a company that has burnt many billions of dollars since its founding in 2006, laid off 17% of its people. Based on what I have heard, cuts were quite uniform across all functions, meaning that one out of six employees is now gone. This is a lot. Given that a typical team has between five and eight people, think of either one person per team gone, and a few managers on top, or every sixth team disappearing.
It is not surprising that there are still huge layoffs in tech. This entire sector has accumulated so much bloat over the last few years that it is hard to believe. For several years in a row, companies had been falling over themselves to hire boatloads of women and minorities just for the sake of it. These people, instead of laying low and enjoying their six-figure sinecures, turned to TikTok to brag about their days consisting of company-paid breakfast, lunch, dinner, endless coffee breaks, red wine on tap, office massages, office yoga, and all the other shenanigans. They believed that “vibing” with their zoomer colleagues was work and justified their sky-high salaries.
I think Elon Musk watched one too many of those “day in the life” videos when he was thinking about buying Twitter, and once he did, the business world was watching. In the meantime, he has laid off 80% of employees, and Twitter is still running great, if not better than before. Sure, you can now say that this company is struggling to survive, but this is due to the ADL strong-arming advertisers into not spending money on it. The bloat in tech is beyond belief, and after Elon Musk had demonstrated that you really may not need thousands of engineers and HR ditzes to run an organization, plenty of other companies have been following suit, some with drastic layoffs, others with more underhanded methods such as putting people on a “performance improvement plan” and managing them out.
When there are layoffs, companies normally try to get rid of the coasters. Sure, some coasters are well-connected, and there may also be productive people who end up getting laid off because others had been taking credit for their work or due to a lack of visibility. By and large, though, the age of people doing make-believe work for half an hour a day at best and pulling six figures is over. Let me hazard a guess: predominantly women and “underrepresented minorities” are affected from such layoffs. This is obviously not to say that there are no really competent women in tech or that you won’t find male slackers. However, it is the case that the hiring bar for diversity candidates tends to be a lot lower and they also normally get held to much lower standards on the job as well. Companies will not admit this publicly, but if you know a few people in this industry, you will hear a lot of stories about this.
I think the particular obnoxiousness displayed by some women in recent years was due to all the easy money they got. If Stacey makes $180k at Meta for some low-effort marketing gig, or Becky gets $300k as a Software Engineer at Google even though her background consists of only a nine-week-long “bootcamp” — these scams have been imploding fast — she thinks that basically any man is beneath her. Now she only would only consider a VP of Engineering with the looks of the hottest guy who ever banged her once in college, eight years ago.
The difference between pulling six-figures for basically no work and making $14.88/h (not a typo!) at Starbucks is staggering. Indeed.com tells me that this is what baristas make, but once the ADL learns about it, they will probably lower the average to $14.87 in order to not accidentally offend anyone’s sensibilities.
I am probably going out on a limb here, but I could imagine that if Becky goes from $300k/year to $14.88/h, she may end up being a bit less picky about men than she used to. However, a woman’s standards often only rise as she ages, as counterintuitive as this may be. Thus, any woman who is affected by a layoff will not or only very slowly adjust her preferences. In contrast, though, I would expect other women who see their older supposed “sisters” getting crushed by reality make different choices in response to that. We also observe this with the current “tradwife” fad where women fantasize about staying at home all day and taking care of their kids instead of pursuing a career as a PowerPoint pusher and having her eggs dry up as they try to climb the corporate ladder.
Ironically, i’ve heard this is true with escorts as well. Apparently 19 year olds who are just starting out charge the least, because of “inexperience”. Yes, the hottest escorts, with the 19 year old tight bodies and who haven’t been ran through a bunch of dicks yet, are the cheapest.
Or so I heard from a friend who’s really into this stuff. He was telling me how he had to beg them to charge him more, coz he felt bad they ask for so little. They’re apparently all like “I’m just a student, why should I ask for more, i’m a nobody”. Whereas older escorts act like they’re the prize.
@AlekNovy
“Apparently 19 year olds who are just starting out charge the least, because of “inexperience”.”
This is indeed true. I have experienced this with strippers. Normally, inexperience sex workers don’t understand the lingo. And their cheap prices is only temporary (it doesn’t last that long) before they begin to understand the lingo, and other sex workers take them under their wing and start teaching them how to charge all these Johns. If you manage to hook up with an inexperience sex worker, they will eventually ask you for more money down the road. What ruins it is that there are desperate men out there who are willing to pay top dollar just for their companionship. Once they learn that men are willing to pay top dollar just for companionship and “NO SEX” they will quickly charge you a lot more no matter how nice you were to them, no matter how good you treated them from the beginning. Its all business. In addition, a lot of inexperience strippers are also naïve about STDs. In fact, most of them will let you go raw before they end up getting some STD down the road and become firm on using protection. Some may ask for a little bit more but not that much.
On the other hand, experience sex workers are the worst, but it also depends on who you get. I’ve met quite a few veteran strippers who didn’t charge me a lot and allowed me to fuck them raw. I’ve been fortunate that I’ve never caught any STDs. However, you will often have experience sex workers who are facing financial hardship that they will charge you very little to fuck. This is counterintuitive, but in this case they are also trying to make you a long term customer by reeling you in. Once they snatch you they will begin to increase their prices and begin to play the sympathy game. And if you refuse to pay more they will try to guilt trip you and tell you how they did you a favor because they didn’t charge you a lot of money to fuck when you first met.
That sounds very similar to what my friend told me, even the sympathy game tricks they do. It seems this stuff is universal.
Maybe companies can fill the diversity requirements by asking their most productive employees to identify as something, like “gender fluid trans-abled POC”.
Not everyone is willing to do that, but I know some people who are. I also feel that compared to trans who cut their dick off and take a ton of hormones, dudes who simply wear dresses to work and put on some make up almost seem like mentally healthy, well-adjusted individuals.
We have one guy in my office who likes to wear dresses, and goes to the office in cosplay of female characters sometimes, but his pronouns are he/his. Go figure
“We have one guy in my office who likes to wear dresses, and goes to the office in cosplay of female characters sometimes, but his pronouns are he/his. Go figure”
This reminds me of when Rosh V said that he will now go to Target restrooms to see naked women!
Do you think there will be a long term correction of bloat in tech or are companies just making temporary downsizing until near zero interest rates return?
A lot of the bloat in tech was due to ZIRP. As money is no longer effectively free, tech companies need to cut costs. I do not think that we will go back to ZIRP anytime soon, so I expect some of the tech excesses we have seen in recent years to be gone for good. Once money is free again, those companies would surely spend it like drunken sailors once more.
Interest rates are currently quite high. The Fed intends to cut interest rates multiple times next year, but this is most likely only to give the economy a bit of a boost for the upcoming election. However, there are systemic issues in the global monetary system that have not been properly addressed yet, and with large parts of the world divesting from the US dollar his is only going to get worse. In my view, we are in “late-stage capitalism” and we will see more and more cracks in the future.