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Ask HN: Has there been a spike in layoffs or belt tightening recently?

9 points by thewarrior ↗ HN
What are people seeing in the tech sector anecdotally ? I’ve been reading about layoffs at Mozilla, Intel, Quora, StubHub, 23AndMe, Oyo.

It seems to be the start of a down trend.

8 comments

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mixmastamyk
Have been quite a few negative economic indicators in the last six months or so, but not particularly decisive. Hard to say which way the trend will go.

It’s an election year so the government will stop at nothing to avoid a recession however.

tropo
Being an election year, many people in the government would stop at nothing to cause a recession.
mixmastamyk
The Fed and to some extent the Prez are "the deciders," and we know which direction they'll support. But, you probably know that already.
tropo
Yes, exactly opposite to each other. They are not friends.
mixmastamyk
No, the fed supports the incumbent government by smoothing the business cycle. Even Volcker had tacit support.
mdorazio
I work on the tech side of vehicle manufacturing and while white collar layoffs haven't hit yet, it's getting bad. See [1]. Freight movement is down significantly and trucking companies are going bankrupt all over the place. Truck order forecasts for 2020 are way down from a year ago, and passenger car isn't looking too hot either. This likely won't spill into the advertising-based SV tech economy for a while, though.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/trucking-companies-bankrupt-...

PaulHoule
I think some of the looser outfits in the Bay Area are being shook out. For each one of those names there were problems in terms of product-market fit. (e.g. Intel can't get 10 nm to market)

In the bigger economy I am concerned by the pause in 737 production which must be hitting suppliers, employees, their families, businesses they frequent, the state welfare budget, etc.

At the higher end of higher ed in the US we recruit foreign students, faculty, and staff who become part of our networks and it would be unhealthy for us if any sort of foreigner such as Chinese, Muslim, African or otherwise did not feel comfortable here.

gaspoweredcat
ive heard intel are carving staff like nobodys business but i assumed that was because theyve been losing so much ground to amd amongst other things

i think if they fail to pull something significant out of the bag very soon they could be in serious trouble, especially if the likes of apple decide to make the switch to amd chips, sure they just posted better than expected revenue but were only just seeing the start of amds rise