I see the same where I work: Reorg and layoffs upcoming.
But the second part (as much as I would like to believe it) makes little sense.
Our company willingly sourced candidates across the globe to find rare talents. They won’t let that effort go to waste. I would be more worried if you can’t express what your added value is for the company/strengths on the market.
I graduated in 2008. Don’t worry so much. Good people are always in demand. Most companies hire even as they do layoffs. Focus on breaking able to explain that you’re a good addition to the team
you will be awash in offers since you are at a peak of two curves -- recent work output and zero seniority for benefits, salary and authority
I predict further race to the bottom in this way, similar to putting 14 year old girls in Olympic Gymnastics, as was done and eventually outlawed. Expect smart high school students in low-income economies to be in demand, and aggressive mob types to make front companies to handle anything about the money
It never hurts to pay attention to the macro economy, but in the end, just live your life and pursue the career you want.
Software development may eventually go the way of textile manufacturing (i.e. only done in poor countries with cheap, unskilled labor) but I doubt you or I will live long enough to see it.
Of course. I'd argue that any CEO worth his or her salt should -always- leave it on the table as an option and evaluate from time to time(6 months sounds fair enough). Not that I'm a fan of layoffs, but no company can be successful if their position is 'no layoffs, ever.'
In other words, the headline means less than nothing.
Just stay professional and keep an open mind and rest assured that by now all our economies inherently depend on all these more or less complex information systems FWIW.
Precisely - its clearly just that "some CEOs" like to chum the water with a little fear to keep staff from leaving (to become the 'last in, first out' somewhere else), and to create pressure against wage rises to enable them to freeze and make derisory offers to keep their wage bills down.
Successful CEOs understand the dynamic you expressed above, however.
Quickly riffing on that, not specifically going into your points but in general: in case of changing dynamics at a specific company (job-to-be-done, mandates changed, etc) almost nothing bad about being let go in this market even.
Usually only upsides. New learning opportunities, remuneration, etc. Too much comfort isn’t good for the good worker either. Think occasional cold shower and fermented Sauerkraut.
Work on your safety belt though, but that should go without saying even during high times. You might miss the people, though you can still keep in touch.
We have it very good, still fight for your worth at all times. Peace.
What did we learn? That you're not more likely to be laid off if you're remote? I don't think there's enough data on that yet as there haven't been all that many layoffs since covid.
It seems like every day there is a new article on Business Insider or Forbes or Fortune about how remote workers are the scourge of all things workplace related. Almost feels like a semi coordinated push from executives (especially those with commercial real estate interests in one form or another) to pay to have stories in these outlets to shift the hive mind in a direction that favors them.
I wonder. It seems as though historically commercial real estate is a gigantic industry with strong relationships to other industries. Anecdotally it seems as though companies that lease their real estate have been much more inclined towards wfh.
No, they're writing what gets clicks or shifts papers. Saying WFH is bad pleases a (large) subset of managers and enrages a lot of the rank and file, but they all click. So that's what they write.
Marketwatch is a subsidiary of Dow Jones which is a subsidiary of News Corp, which also owns Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and Investor's Business Daily, among others.
It is not just commercial real estate. If you think about it, there are several market segments that benefit from people commuting. Transportation infrastructure companies, car manufactures, office supplies, oil companies, etc.
I have a conspiracy theory that collusion is exactly what's going on here, and not just with the "back to the office" push, but also with how kafkaesque the hiring process has gotten.
With remote work, an employee can work multiple jobs simultaneously, and they're unbeholden to any one employer, what with how easy it is to apply and switch to a new one. So how do companies combat this? They introduce friction at the very start of the pipeline - hiring. Multiple rounds of oral exams, take-home exams, leetcode questions that can only be answered with weeks or months of deliberate studying (something an already-employed person has little time for) - flaming hoops galore. They'll still compete with one another, sure, but they've found it's in their best interests if they all agree to hire in this kind of fraudulent manner.
It is plausible, but at least the medium and small fish in the pond seem to be doing it out of typical human stupidity rather than a conscious effort. Or worse, they try to imitate the big fish.
I’m all for hiring employees without interviews. Most of them will quit their job, work for me one day, then stress out because they didn’t match.
So, out of respect, I do perform tests.
But some employees who seem perfectly good during tests come into the company with plenty of grammar mistakes, then I notice that they only master the surface of everything and they get fired.
I should charge employees for passing my exams, since it lowers the risk of misadventures. I’m so tired of this “Employers are evil” trope often suffixed with “because going to a coding interview is like working for free.”
I should do lengthy tests just to filter out stingy employees. (and I talk as someone who gave a 78% raise to one employee who’s been here 10 months, and 30% to the other).
Or you could very well hire them for a few days (on holidays at their ob or on unpaid leave for contractors), see how it goes and take it from there.
I don't think employers are evil, they don't get value out of the interview process. I would say both employer and prospect employee gets a similar value out of it (the chance of hiring / being hired).
I think employers (or better, their middle managers in charge or recruitment) are mostly stupid and inefficient.
Working together for a bit is the only way of actually checking if someone will be fine doing the job or not.
Demonstrating some random knowledge is not a good predictor of success. I worked with people who passed leetcoding and were trash and people who didn't who were amazing.
I found out about their qualities only after a few weeks of work (not even full time, even just on and off).
I do think like you, but working in many places at the same time would not be possible in many countries, just because of tax declaration.
But yes, I think it cannot be coincidence all those articles pushing the back to the office, when (at least what I have seen) the productivity has undoubtedly raised.
A company could see you are working at multiple places, but the tax authorities could say you can't work multiple full time jobs maybe? In the us I bet you could just do it. You'd have opt out of those horrible places where companies want to share your salary info. I really can't believe that is actually legal still, even though I know it is since my own salary history was mostly there. Little companies like startups I have worked in didn't do that.
In Australia employees provide a form to their employer which is basically "set aside tax from my pay as though this is my only source of income" vs "tax me at a higher rate".
IIRC the wording on the form is simplified to make it seem like the question is "do you have another source of income?"
That makes sense. In the USA, we can just specify additional withholding without any justification. This can be the result of other income (stocks included), but also due to people having a working spouse.
Or, it could jsut be that middle managers are extroverted and extremely desperate for social engagement, like in meetings because they have no life outside of work. Harsh, I know. but, several friends i have that are managers admitted to me that they felt the covid lock downs were hard on them because they couldn't see or interact with anyone in person.
I don't, but I wouldn't judge someone for it unless they were violating a legally enforceable contract. People work multiple in-person jobs all the time to survive. Nothing in my mind is different just because some people do it with remote jobs.
> people work multiple in-person jobs all the time to survive.
but the difference here is the concurrency. In-person jobs require the person, so you cannot do two at the same time.
But a remote job, where the employer assumes you have their job at full attention, might be short-changed if you were to work two remote jobs at the same time. That is, of course, unless you work remote for two employers, in two different time zones (so basically the same as the two in-person jobs).
I don't see the issue as long as they get the work done right. If they don't and aren't fired, the company has bigger issues than people working multiple jobs. If they do the work well, then practicing arbitrage between the employer's expectations and the realistic time requirements with automation is just doing what the employer does from the other direction. I'm sure the employer has used technology and outsourcing to get rid of at least as many jobs as multi-jobbing employees take using the same technology.
Not everyone just accepts the promise of automation to free us from tedium is lost to ever-growing corporate balance sheets.
I have done the concurrent remote job thing for 15 years now. I'm open about it and nobody seems to really care. I expect they would prefer my full attention, but they also know I have another job right there, so they're pressured to work with my needs so long as they want to benefit from the value I provide in kind.
As someone who does hiring, I can say that (at least my organization) has not conspired with any other company. I suspect what you're seeing is the result of what I'm seeing: it is extremely challenging to assess a candidate remotely.
I'm not saying all of the things you mentioned are a good solution to that problem, but I do believe they are how some organizations are (poorly) attempting to solve it.
We have now hired 3 (that we know of) people who turned out to be different from the person we interviewed. I suspect one other, and one of my colleagues suspects a fifth. The is a problem for several reasons.
We have talked about many of the ideas that you mentioned, and tried some, but ultimately decided that they are too burdensome. So, now we only hire remote people in cities where a long term employee already works and they can attend the interview in person to verify the person being interviewed in not cheating or getting assistance in any way. Our solution isn't perfect, but it's what we're doing until we can find a better solution.
It's pretty obvious when you look at who is quoted in these articles that someone is paying for at least one PR push related to this. PG wrote about how this works in one of his older essays, in fact: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
This is so insightful, thank you so much for posting it as I have never seen the article yet it clarifies so much I have always hypothesized. I’m curious if there is any level of transparency (anywhere, not simply the US) as to what PR firms work with specific groups of publishers. Of course I highly doubt this, but I’d love to trace the origins of a lot of these coordinated narratives.
Absolutely agree. They are doing it to change the narrative and make people think that being back in the office is what the majority want. These executives are the ones that have access to mainstream media to get their propaganda out there. The average person does not.
The VP of Sales where I work recently posted about our record breaking month and how he can't wait to get back to the office as it'll be mandatory starting in October.
The irony, as you can see clear as day, is that they achieved the record month while everyone was working remotely.
Someone actually called him out on it, surprisingly, but he simply backpedaled and said remote is just not his personal preference.
No -- they did not learn ANYTHING over the last few years and I suspect that the pandemic will be looked back on with a bit of nostalgia in a few years when we look back.
There will always be the horrors that came with it, but there will also be people who got time off work, fathers who got to spend more time with their kids, people who got a lot of their lives back by avoiding commutes, etc.
I realize I'm opening myself up to get completely roasted in the comments because the pandemic was really rough on people, but I hope I preemptively addressed that here in saying that the pandemic also shed a light in other areas of our life that need change.
Everyone experienced the pandemic differently and your experience is just as valid as anyone else’s. I don’t have kids and walked to work, so my experience wasn’t very different working from home (which I still am). The difference it made on the fathers I work with was profound. They are able to drop off and pick up their kids from school because they’re close by now, they spend 0 time commuting vs over an hour before, and generally seem less stressed than when they were in the office. Productivity has soared as well. We’re never going back.
Economy needs workers though, downturn or not. Not going into the reality of ongoing pandemic (attrition to health is real) but in general the last word on remote mandates hasn’t been spoken at all if workers don’t give in readily. It’s an ongoing discussion that can settle to good learnings / outcomes for all parties involved. Fear is the mind-killer.
Who is more likely to get fired if you are choosing between two similar competent people and you have been told you need to pick one: The one you sit next to and have lunch with a few days a week and possibly lives in your general neighborhood? or the person which you have never met in person and lives 2000 miles away?
Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. When you say statements like the one noted above which aren't true, but I mean..."hey, it sounds like it could be true and do you want to take that risk?"
Just because you don't want to believe it, doesn't make it not true - its human nature to be more protective of the people you know better/personally than those you have never met.
From what’s I have seen remote workers tend to survive layoffs more than office workers. I don’t know if this is a common trend, but remote workers are generally cheaper including overhead which is a major point when it comes to cost cutting initiatives.
Selection bias. Remote workers also tend to skew more senior/experienced. The new guy who isn't providing much value is always the first to get cut, and he's also the same guy who is less likely to be trusted to WFH.
A lot of remote workers on here seem to expect to be paid the same salary regardless of where they're working though. So they would indeed be more likely to get laid off, as they cost the same amount but haven't developed those in-person relationships with the decision-maker.
Excuse me? I expect to be paid more because unlike on site workers i deliver more work and of higher quality. Also i play less sleazy politics and do less decision maker boot leaking.
Why would anything besides performance and value factor into this decision? "Mary just gets more done for the money than Bob does... but I haven't seen her in awhile... Gone."
That assumes rationality, unfortunately. It would be nice if performance was the only factor in a managers decision, but we all know that managers have a tendency to prefer the employees that they see often. That being said if you were hired as a remote employee, I wouldn't worry.
It's 100% rational from the manager's individual POV to choose to lay off someone you don't know so well vs someone you see every day in person and consider a friend.
There is always a "perceived performance". Once a year (typically) managers evaluate the associates; same evaluation is performed when one has to go. If seen somebody everyday plays a role, yes, maybe.
But for example, 5 years ago, I worked in a team, when I was only couple of days in the office. Others every day. I saw my team manager the days I was in the office... and also at weekends, because we were friends... so... it all depends.
Yep. It can help if you ask their coworkers across the business for multiple types of feedback, but it's never going to be anything close to perfect. How do you define "performance" of someone who spent time helping 5 other teams deliver with their expertise, but then didn't quite do the thing they were given to do? It's not an absolute thing, and so we shouldn't be bemoaning that it's not used enough as a measurement.
One of the arguments is that people do not objectively determine performance and value and are likely to become biased by spending time with people in-person.
My upper management wants me badly in the office. It’s 12 seat open office. These people have their own comfy offices, but work all days every week from home. What a paradox.
Flexibility about where and, to some degree, when/how-much, one works, plus how surveilled one is while working, is a status-related perk (and connected more broadly to social class). No surprise execs who are used to maximal freedom on those see expanding those perks to the peons as a threat to their own status.
"But what if they fuck off to play golf at 2:30 PM or sneakily take a vacation to the beach without using vacation time while in fact only working part of the time for that week?" says the exec, before fucking off to play golf at 2:30 PM and then help the spouse and kids pack for for tomorrow's vacation-disguised-as-a-business-trip.
My girlfriend's uncle told me over Christmas dinner, his job is to go golfing with US bank CEOs. That's how they do business! We're being scammed, and them too.
There's even one[1] of these in the show Silicon Valley. The seasoned, solid-track-record, expert exec they bring in the show to be the "grown up" in charge as the startup begins to take off, who's out of the office messing with his horse-breeding hobby half the time. Like everything else in that show, it's not even really satire.
[1] I haven't finished the show, so maybe "at least one"
Hum... You are just assuming similar competent people get on this situation a with relevant odds.
What is a very odd assumption, because if a company is firing based on competence, similar competent people will get on the same bracket and both fired or kept. And no large company knows enough to fire based on personal competence anyway. So yeah, it's FUD.
It's a lot more complicated than that. How much more does that in-person employee cost, for example.
Even with the current uncertainty there are employees choosing to change jobs rather than go to an office. Even if you freeze hiring, you need to make sure you're retaining the employees you have.
People don't even have to similar in competence... the farther away from the headquarters you are the less influence and importance you have. common sense
You are assuming a good relation... what if the guy who comes to be office happens to be dirty, or loud, or smelly, or whatever discomfort he may impose to the decision maker? What if the decision maker is a lazy manager (have never seen one!) that feels observed but this guy coming everyday to the office? Moreover, what if the manager himself, prefers to not come to the office...
The article doesn't say, but it's a safe bet to assume that the kinds of CEO's they're interviewing are the CEO's of big fortune (at least) 1000 companies, all of which have satellite offices. If remote workers should be worried, the people who report to satellite offices and join every call by zoom anyway should be just as worried (and should have been just as worried during every downturn). How many of us, if we did return to the office, would actually have any physical face-to-face contact with our direct supervisors, or anybody else up the chain?
I said from the beginning it’s all a matter of time before we all go back. The C suite loves seeing butts in seats. Outside of software, and even some reluctance there, I think most leaders are only not going back full in office because they don’t want an exodus during a labor shortage. Otherwise they’d have required it by now.
I’m privy to the boardroom setting and know the C suite personalities well enough. They make jokes about lazy inefficiency of WFH. They feel out of control if they can’t walk to your desk and demand something is a priority. They don’t know how to lead in a WFH world. Also, by definition their job is usually to be in meetings all day every day and they just don’t enjoy the zoom experience as much because of it. They like to wear fancy dry cleaned cloths when everyone else just wants to wear basketball shorts and a tee shirt at home.
Employees learned, yes. But I don't think big co's have bought into it enough and i'm afraid the "compromise" is going to eventually be a lot of jobs either moved overseas or just a race-to-the-bottom for salaries within the U.S. as employees are sourced from areas with lower cost of living.
If we convince employers that we're "more productive" at home, then whats stopping them from finding cheaper employees elsewhere?
Maybe not for the software guys/gals but this is unfortunately solid advice for others. My experience outside the normal HN jobs/industry is that if you’re remote you’re considered second class.
I've definitely noticed a shift in the investment banking industry over the past two months.
Upper management is being much more assertive in their push to get everyone back in the office, away from the current 'hybrid 3-day a week but not really enforced' model to 'we need everyone back 5 days a week in all hands on deck mode to navigate the coming recession.'
How is it FUD? No better way to built trust than in person. If your supervisor doesn't trust you why would they hold onto you when faced with a choice?
I just searched "are we in a recession" on Google. Seems like a popular enough question yet Google doesn't directly provide any context-aware answers next to the "people also ask" box nor "enriched and interactive search results".
The US is officially in a recession when the National Bureau of Economic Research says we are. Two quarters of shrinking GDP is often used as a heuristic but other factors like duration and intensity are included as well. Sometimes labor and unemployment data gets corrected months later, so it is sometimes the case that a recession is not official until it has already passed.
Basically, in the US, we are in a recession when the Business Cycle Dating Committee says so.
We're not "officially" in a recession because the midterms are just around the corner. The numbers they use to judge inflation, GDP, recession are all fudged for political purposes. I don't need some greased politician or partisan body to tell me that.
This would be the same regardless of which party were in power, the government lies.
Ah yes, the self-appointed, private, and secretive cabal of folks that decided they would be arbiters of truth, NBER.
Here's the thing -- there is no "official" or "legal" definition of recession in the United States. Yes, you'll hear regulators and politicians defer to NBER, but that's it.
The most common definition used by economists and the financial industry is the same one used world-wide: two quarters of negative growth. And by that measure we're in a recession.
The White House's official position is that the NBER's definition is the official one. From their website [1]:
"What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle. Instead, both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data—including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes.
"[...] The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee—the official recession scorekeeper—defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.”"
You can certainly make the argument that people shouldn't use this definition or that better measures exist, but it's objectively the official definition used by the US federal government.
So Hurricane Ian hit Florida, is it a disaster? Legally it isn't a disaster until the governor signs the disaster declaration.
Similarly are we in a recession? Legally the National Bureau of Economic Research gets to make that call. The rule of thumb is it gets called when for consecutive quarters of GDP contraction. However they have said they refuse to call it because unemployment is low and wages are doing well.
So you can call it whatever you like, legally it is just another day.
It could well be that 50% of CEOs are always "considering" cutting jobs in the next 6 months. I mean, I suspect that this number is higher than usual because, well, it does look like we're heading into a recession. But if I'm interpreting this number based on my perception of the recession, then this number is useless at the main point of this article: informing me on whether we're heading into a recession or not.
> It could well be that 50% of CEOs are always "considering" cutting jobs in the next 6 months
They are not. CEOs are generally optimistic. this is a very bad sign. 99.99999% of knowing what someone will do is what they say. people try to read way too much into other things, "what were they really thinking? how has that changed over time?" etc etc. sometimes you just have to snap out of it and LISTEN.
and what you hear is very bad, and far from 'useless'.
as far as whether we are heading into a recession or not, we are not. We are already in a recession. We've had 2 quarters of shrinking GDP. maybe we notch a positive quarter in between the next negative quarter, but its a recession. stop over thinking it.
> We are already in a recession. We've had 2 quarters of shrinking GDP. maybe we notch a positive quarter in between the next negative quarter, but its a recession. stop over thinking it.
That definition of recession is not codified.
The official definition is that we’re in a recession only after an octogenarian declares it (retroactively of course).
Which points to why the whole "two consecutive quarters" rule is not, and should not be, definitive. The country could see a 50% collapse in a single quarter and see 2-3% growth each quarter for years, and not be in a recession by that definition.
It wouldn't be unusual for a major economic calamity to occur within a single quarter. Both Covid lock downs and the collapse of AIG/LB happened within a matter of weeks.
> The country could see a 50% collapse in a single quarter and see 2-3% growth each quarter for years, and not be in a recession by that definition.
But that's not receding, that's has receded.
If your implied definition is slipping below the growth trend, then any '50% collapse' is going to ensure 'recession' (by this definition) for probably (or even hopefully) a long time.
A recession is past tense. One can speculate that we are in a recession, but it's not feasible to collect all the information necessary to make that determination in real time. The best one can do is say, "a recession started six months ago, and I think the situation is better/the same/worse."
Yeah, the cutoff points for any rule of thumb are going to be fairly arbitrary. I don't understand why people are treating this like a profound observation.
Q1 and Q2 of 2020 had negative real GDP, so yes, 2020 was a recession. When they say back to back quarters of negative GDP does not mean a recession, what they really mean is not having back to back quarters of GDP does not mean its not a recession. as in 2001 when GDP shrank in Q1 and Q3 but not Q2.
Almost every situation in history of 1 0 1 is considered a recession but 2011, but that one wasn't considered one because Obama was president. however, every time that I know of, back to back shrinking quarters has always been a recession, as far as I know.
And it matches up, we all know its a recession now (except those who want to deny its one because of their political view). its a recession, you only look more wrong trying to deny the obvious.
The comment that you're replying to is poking fun at the way the biden administration responded to the report saying there were two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. Everyone "knew" that a recession meant two quarters of negative growth, but we were told that actually it's only a recession if the people in charge say so. You do "trust the experts", right?
We haven't had any increase in unemployment yet, this isn't a recession.
Two periods of negative GDP growth without a rise in unemployment is unprecedented, but that is largely the result of bullwhip effects of the pandemic which was unprecedented.
The actual recession is going to be substantially worse.
The people who argue that we're in a recession right now due to two quarters of negative GDP growth while discounting the fact that every other indicator of the economy has been pretty healthy up until recently just makes me think "tell me you were too young to remember 2008/2001/1992/1982/1980 without telling me you were too young to remember".
IDK it is probably pointless to argue about this with people who will double-down on the strict definition that they think they know. Wait for another 12-24 months and let me know if it feels and order of magnitude worse or not.
(Agreed, though, that CEOs are generally almost naive optimists and that when they're all pessimistic about the economy it can almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy)
You aren't wrong, but CEOs are also herd animals. Someone starts talking about a new initiative or a new idea, suddenly they are all talking about it to keep up with the Joneses. So when enough start talking about cuts or scaling back hiring, they all have to address it or they fear looking out of touch. Cuts can also help pad quarterly numbers, regardless of the real health of the company, so it can help those execs keep their job just a bit longer so long as it looks like they are demonstrating leadership.
Also think a key question is whether there will still be NET hiring, if I’m planning on hiring 10 people over the next year, and am thinking about letting 5 go, that is very different than thinking about letting 5 go and not planning on hiring anyone
The news doesn't exist to give you an accurate model of reality.
It primarily exists to give you a believable model that promotes behavior of the masses towards the interests of the owners of the company or nation state that controls it.
From that perspective, does anything exist to give you an accurate model of reality? Education? It's only to the control the masses and also makes money for book sellers? Science, just makes money for grant writers and equipment sellers? All that is somewhat true but doesn't really encompass the actual reality, which is plenty of journalists are interested in communicating what is happening, even while some are just pushing their vision or making money. Same is true of scientists, teachers, etc.
> Nine in ten CEOs in the U.S. (91%) believe a recession will arrive in the coming 12 months, while 86% of CEOs globally feel the same way
- So what? Most CEOs I know cannot foresee what they will eat tomorrow. No offence, but being CEO makes you no better at predicting the future as the janitor. "They have, more info, experience" yada yada... I knew just too many incompetent CEOs.
Also, what does it mean, cutting jobs... how many? why? which ones?
Most large corp CEOs are briefed by analysts, and they’re all probably telling them their “predictions”
Here is an interesting thought experiment: if McKinsey wanted to force a recession, could they invoke one by telling all the CEOs the worst possible news and making terrible recommendations?
Yes they could. The economy is partly psychological. Once the everyday needs are met, spending on the stretch items can be delayed psychologically to reduce GDP.
This really sounds to me like CEO's preemptively torching their companies, thus creating a recession. Good luck getting all those employees familiar with the product and culture back now that they feel betrayed. Get ready to train some new less skilled employees in the future at great cost. Way to destroy shareholder value by reducing profit, lowering product quality, and not being able to ship on time! This is like trying to time investments in the markets. Unless you can manipulate the markets it is impossible to do. Wait until _your_ sector of the market is in trouble and _then_ consider whether cutting jobs makes sense, otherwise you may be shooting yourself in the foot by creating the problems you fear as you follow the herd off the cliff.
It's a bs factoid in the first place. Most CEOs I meet are in a perpetual "next two years will be recession" mode. I guess my counter to bs stats is leveraging my own anecdote, but whatever I think it's prevelant enough.
50% seems strangely like “Either there is a recession, either there isn’t, that makes 50%”.
No, really, most people have a stake one way or another, and when presented a chance to influence the populace, by making people afraid of losing their jobs and making other CEOs afraid of hiring like crazy, they’ll say the line whether it’s true or false.
Which came first; a recession or a meme of a recession.
This recession is a self fulfilling prophecy intentionally triggered by the Fed at the behest of Congress behind the scenes to curtail the public meta mind technology companies were creating via social media.
Don’t stop doing. There’s no reason our agency must be coupled to macro economic views of a coddled minority. The public gifts them their hallucination of being a valuable member of society. We don’t have to coddle their figurative identity.
I agree that we’re practically in a recession and that our present recession was brought about from congress via the fed. However, that particular chain of events was set in motion in the 1970s with the public mandate set for the FOMC. It wasn’t a recent secretive reaction to tech companies.
Do you mind expanding on your statement that the current actions of the fed/congress are a reaction to technology companies?
Accuracy of prediction isn’t important here. CEOs make budgets with allocations for new hires and raises. They also fire people, too. Every CEO could be 100% wrong and we’d still have the trappings of a recession.
As a CEO I speak to other CEOs on a regular basis about what we're seeing. That means I'm clued in to my customers' trends, vendors' trends, and competitors' trends. I see stuff happening in my industry from a more holistic perspective than my employees. I can tell the difference between a revenue decline from a lack of competitiveness versus industry decline. You might not see us working but we talk. A lot.
It sounds like you're operating under the assumption that nothing is predictable in the economy and that we're all looking in to a crystal ball. In reality we're looking at our financials and sales trends and then comparing that data up and down the supply chain.
We're not smarter than everyone else. No, we're just more clued in to what's happening with our capital markets, vendors, competitors, and customers.
Hey! I’m currently an ml engineer and my dream is to be ceo of a mid size company one day. Do you have any advice for how I can move into that direction?
No advice but I can share my perspectives. I happened to be at the right place at the right time to start a company and be an early player in a new technology that created a multi-billion market that didn't exist before. I happened to have the cross-trained in the right combination of skills and showed up at the right time. Skill alone wouldn't have been enough.
Try to be forward thinking about what trends might be coming. It used to be easier to do this but now everyone hops on trends quickly so it's harder to maintain a head start.
I'm looking at my next venture right now and I'm mostly focused on the overall macro picture surrounding the growth prospects of an industry. Things like population dynamics are playing a bigger part of how I see opportunity. The best CEO won't accomplish much in a dying or flat industry.
Ignore people who say "X is saturated". Everything is saturated. What matters is if the market is going to grow.
Now I'm more focused on wealth deployment and preservation and trying to focus less on building new things. Building is where my passion is but it's high risk and I don't need to be taking risks anymore.
Really appreciate The time you’ve put into this! I have no wealth or anything like that, so the road for me will definitely be to work like a dog for the next 10 years and hope someone wants to pay handsomely for what I build (honestly even being a senior at faang I’ll never escape the middle class paying income tax). Afterwards I’ll move to a lower tax/col country snd live like a king
The average CEO can't even figure out why they can't seem to hire new people, but somehow they are very well clued in to market fluctuation? I think it is more reasonable to assume equal competence.
Bull fucking shit. If CEOs can talk their way into predicting the economy, why the fuck are most companies firing large swaths of their workforce? Couldnt predict a tech recession after a global pandemic?
This post is completely content-free. You make assertions that these CEOs don't know their hat from their ass, while you offer nothing to the contrary, no evidence or even conjecture or "Well, my cousin's dog told me their company is looking at stepping up hiring for Q4."
Honestly I don't think you'll get good faith considerations on whether we're heading into a recession. Anecdotally, I'm trying to buy a house in Portland. I stopped being so aggressive as I watched prices start falling by tens of thousands. I got a call from Rocket Mortgage the other day where they tried to convince me that market prices won't change and I should buy now at a rate of 6.5%. This is an incredible departure from reality and similar to what I hear from real estate agents.
This is a company that I know previously to be quite ethical, yet here they are doing dirty tricks. Market falls can be a threat to companies, but by engaging with propaganda trolls can influence the market and make money. Read any mortgage or real estate propaganda and you'll see they're all using the same words, false comparisons, etc. Maybe the true signal of a recession is the defiance of admitting there is a recession.
During my last mortgage search, my personal experience is that mortgage rates were positively correlated with the number of commercials I've seen for their services.
I ended up asking my real estate agent for suggestions and she suggested a local hole in the wall originator that gave me significantly better rates than anyone else.
Unless you have something strange, all mortgages get sold into the same pool at basically the same prices, so increased marketing spend has to be made up somewhere.
Don’t get me wrong, Rocket is a terrible deal but you can do a lot worse. After using mortgage servicers that required me to use a literal fax machine, took 2 months to close, and who’s idea of an app is a broken website that requires Internet Explorer, they are much easier to deal with.
They might be correct if the assumption is that interest rates are going up (but that's not clear so is definitely in the FUD area of propaganda techniques)
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We're going to be in a recession because CEOs decided six months ago that we're doing a recession soon and it turns out that if you lay off enough people and stop hiring across the economy because you think there's a recession coming, you get a recession!
>informing me on whether we're heading into a recession or not
look at consumer debt levels and how several major banks in Europe are ready to blow up, not a sign of a healthy economy. Unemployment rates are a lagging indicator for recessions, companies don't start laying people off until revenue takes a hit. The Fed has outright said they are going to keep raising rates until people start losing jobs so inflation declines.
Alternately. 50% of CEO were over reliant on cheap debt and need to reduce headcount to stay afloat as interest rates rise.
Another more conspiratorial take. Since wage growth finally started again for the average worker, talks of recession are an attempt to crush that growth.
And what is the normal history of this statistic? If it's normally 75% of bosses who are considering cutting, maybe 50% is good. If it's normally 10%, maybe it's bad.
1 - Hire assuming people work < 8 hr day.
2 - Don't overburden them.
3 - Don't try to drive hyper-productivity.
4 - Do manage people for results; counsel those who are not performing at level* and yes, fire them if you can't help them get going.
* See point 2
Results (in my experience):
A - Less turnover
B - Better quality (because people have time to think; less technical debt because less "I'm exhausted so let's just ship it"
C - People have useful ideas because they have some time to think
D - Customers happier; revenue more dependable
E - in the inevitable but rare times there is a crunch people are more likely to have the energy for it and understand why/how it happened.
At least, this has always worked for me, as some other HN commenters can corroborate.
Cut the pay of your highest paid and they’ll just leave and go somewhere that won’t cut their pay. At my last job I saw that writing on the wall and left. That company slowly imploded over the next year all the while steadily cutting everyone’s pay promising a turn around each quarter. I saved probably a 100k by leaving let alone what I added with the new job.
“ One caveat for people who like working from home: Remote workers may find it in their best interest to show their faces in the office as their job security becomes more uncertain.”
We need a mechanism for scrutinising these media workers. They negatively influence our daily lives and are as much if not more corrupt than politicians. Wondering how much bribe marketwatch took for slipping in this crap?
Of course they are, currently there is a negative feedback loop in mainstream media and business news. They are reporting anything from a mild recession to economic collapse in the current slump; so the CEOs think about firing people then the media interviews/surveys execs and the cycle repeats and gets worse and worse until better economic information comes in.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadBut the second part (as much as I would like to believe it) makes little sense.
Our company willingly sourced candidates across the globe to find rare talents. They won’t let that effort go to waste. I would be more worried if you can’t express what your added value is for the company/strengths on the market.
I’ve told this to myself many times over my career. And been wrong so many times.
Software is still and ever increasingly eating the world FWIW…
Don’t fall for the doomsday folks, they either don’t understand the dynamics and/or are just in it for the drama.
It’s actually still a great time to negotiate for premiums. Keep calm and carry on.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/it-will-be-mostly-a-white-...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/17/tech-silico...
I predict further race to the bottom in this way, similar to putting 14 year old girls in Olympic Gymnastics, as was done and eventually outlawed. Expect smart high school students in low-income economies to be in demand, and aggressive mob types to make front companies to handle anything about the money
It never hurts to pay attention to the macro economy, but in the end, just live your life and pursue the career you want.
Software development may eventually go the way of textile manufacturing (i.e. only done in poor countries with cheap, unskilled labor) but I doubt you or I will live long enough to see it.
In other words, the headline means less than nothing.
Just stay professional and keep an open mind and rest assured that by now all our economies inherently depend on all these more or less complex information systems FWIW.
Successful CEOs understand the dynamic you expressed above, however.
Usually only upsides. New learning opportunities, remuneration, etc. Too much comfort isn’t good for the good worker either. Think occasional cold shower and fermented Sauerkraut.
Work on your safety belt though, but that should go without saying even during high times. You might miss the people, though you can still keep in touch.
We have it very good, still fight for your worth at all times. Peace.
Glad to see this FUD being shared still. Did we learn nothing over the last few years?
Much like when the papers write so much nationalistic tripe that the people reading them actually start both believing it, and expecting it.
No, they're writing what gets clicks or shifts papers. Saying WFH is bad pleases a (large) subset of managers and enrages a lot of the rank and file, but they all click. So that's what they write.
And I say that as someone working in tech missing the office.
With remote work, an employee can work multiple jobs simultaneously, and they're unbeholden to any one employer, what with how easy it is to apply and switch to a new one. So how do companies combat this? They introduce friction at the very start of the pipeline - hiring. Multiple rounds of oral exams, take-home exams, leetcode questions that can only be answered with weeks or months of deliberate studying (something an already-employed person has little time for) - flaming hoops galore. They'll still compete with one another, sure, but they've found it's in their best interests if they all agree to hire in this kind of fraudulent manner.
So, out of respect, I do perform tests.
But some employees who seem perfectly good during tests come into the company with plenty of grammar mistakes, then I notice that they only master the surface of everything and they get fired.
I should charge employees for passing my exams, since it lowers the risk of misadventures. I’m so tired of this “Employers are evil” trope often suffixed with “because going to a coding interview is like working for free.”
I should do lengthy tests just to filter out stingy employees. (and I talk as someone who gave a 78% raise to one employee who’s been here 10 months, and 30% to the other).
A subjugated worker doesn't make a very good problem solver. They're really good at following procedure, though.
I don't think employers are evil, they don't get value out of the interview process. I would say both employer and prospect employee gets a similar value out of it (the chance of hiring / being hired).
I think employers (or better, their middle managers in charge or recruitment) are mostly stupid and inefficient.
Working together for a bit is the only way of actually checking if someone will be fine doing the job or not.
Demonstrating some random knowledge is not a good predictor of success. I worked with people who passed leetcoding and were trash and people who didn't who were amazing.
I found out about their qualities only after a few weeks of work (not even full time, even just on and off).
But yes, I think it cannot be coincidence all those articles pushing the back to the office, when (at least what I have seen) the productivity has undoubtedly raised.
Can you expand upon this?
IIRC the wording on the form is simplified to make it seem like the question is "do you have another source of income?"
Oh and the amount of meetings skyrocketed.
Dumped my last client because it turned into basically 8hrs of meetings
I tried to check the overlap with /r/churning but it looks like overemployed isn't in the database.
https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/overemplo...
edit: the concept has made appearances on HN
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29666867
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29633083
but the difference here is the concurrency. In-person jobs require the person, so you cannot do two at the same time.
But a remote job, where the employer assumes you have their job at full attention, might be short-changed if you were to work two remote jobs at the same time. That is, of course, unless you work remote for two employers, in two different time zones (so basically the same as the two in-person jobs).
Not everyone just accepts the promise of automation to free us from tedium is lost to ever-growing corporate balance sheets.
I'm not saying all of the things you mentioned are a good solution to that problem, but I do believe they are how some organizations are (poorly) attempting to solve it.
We have now hired 3 (that we know of) people who turned out to be different from the person we interviewed. I suspect one other, and one of my colleagues suspects a fifth. The is a problem for several reasons.
We have talked about many of the ideas that you mentioned, and tried some, but ultimately decided that they are too burdensome. So, now we only hire remote people in cities where a long term employee already works and they can attend the interview in person to verify the person being interviewed in not cheating or getting assistance in any way. Our solution isn't perfect, but it's what we're doing until we can find a better solution.
The irony, as you can see clear as day, is that they achieved the record month while everyone was working remotely.
Someone actually called him out on it, surprisingly, but he simply backpedaled and said remote is just not his personal preference.
No -- they did not learn ANYTHING over the last few years and I suspect that the pandemic will be looked back on with a bit of nostalgia in a few years when we look back.
There will always be the horrors that came with it, but there will also be people who got time off work, fathers who got to spend more time with their kids, people who got a lot of their lives back by avoiding commutes, etc.
I realize I'm opening myself up to get completely roasted in the comments because the pandemic was really rough on people, but I hope I preemptively addressed that here in saying that the pandemic also shed a light in other areas of our life that need change.
Just as the covid and flu season starts up.
Who is more likely to get fired if you are choosing between two similar competent people and you have been told you need to pick one: The one you sit next to and have lunch with a few days a week and possibly lives in your general neighborhood? or the person which you have never met in person and lives 2000 miles away?
But for example, 5 years ago, I worked in a team, when I was only couple of days in the office. Others every day. I saw my team manager the days I was in the office... and also at weekends, because we were friends... so... it all depends.
Because people making decisions are often influenced by their own biases and social preferences, unfortunately.
"But what if they fuck off to play golf at 2:30 PM or sneakily take a vacation to the beach without using vacation time while in fact only working part of the time for that week?" says the exec, before fucking off to play golf at 2:30 PM and then help the spouse and kids pack for for tomorrow's vacation-disguised-as-a-business-trip.
My girlfriend's uncle told me over Christmas dinner, his job is to go golfing with US bank CEOs. That's how they do business! We're being scammed, and them too.
[1] I haven't finished the show, so maybe "at least one"
What is a very odd assumption, because if a company is firing based on competence, similar competent people will get on the same bracket and both fired or kept. And no large company knows enough to fire based on personal competence anyway. So yeah, it's FUD.
Even with the current uncertainty there are employees choosing to change jobs rather than go to an office. Even if you freeze hiring, you need to make sure you're retaining the employees you have.
People don't even have to similar in competence... the farther away from the headquarters you are the less influence and importance you have. common sense
I came to that depressing realisation a few months into Covid. The whole world suddenly learned
- remote work is fine
- it was so much better for the environment to not commute constantly
- you do not need mass migration for a services economy
and then we all promptly forgot it.
I’m privy to the boardroom setting and know the C suite personalities well enough. They make jokes about lazy inefficiency of WFH. They feel out of control if they can’t walk to your desk and demand something is a priority. They don’t know how to lead in a WFH world. Also, by definition their job is usually to be in meetings all day every day and they just don’t enjoy the zoom experience as much because of it. They like to wear fancy dry cleaned cloths when everyone else just wants to wear basketball shorts and a tee shirt at home.
If we convince employers that we're "more productive" at home, then whats stopping them from finding cheaper employees elsewhere?
Upper management is being much more assertive in their push to get everyone back in the office, away from the current 'hybrid 3-day a week but not really enforced' model to 'we need everyone back 5 days a week in all hands on deck mode to navigate the coming recession.'
aren't we in a recession?
In America, half of the CEOs (51%) say they’re considering workforce reductions during the next six months
CEO's consider a lot of things, might be nice to see a graph of this over time.
So you're going to see some confusion on this topic until the politics around it settle down a bit.
Basically, in the US, we are in a recession when the Business Cycle Dating Committee says so.
https://www.nber.org/research/business-cycle-dating
This would be the same regardless of which party were in power, the government lies.
Here's the thing -- there is no "official" or "legal" definition of recession in the United States. Yes, you'll hear regulators and politicians defer to NBER, but that's it.
The most common definition used by economists and the financial industry is the same one used world-wide: two quarters of negative growth. And by that measure we're in a recession.
"What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle. Instead, both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data—including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes.
"[...] The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Business Cycle Dating Committee—the official recession scorekeeper—defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.”"
You can certainly make the argument that people shouldn't use this definition or that better measures exist, but it's objectively the official definition used by the US federal government.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2022/07/21/...
Similarly are we in a recession? Legally the National Bureau of Economic Research gets to make that call. The rule of thumb is it gets called when for consecutive quarters of GDP contraction. However they have said they refuse to call it because unemployment is low and wages are doing well.
So you can call it whatever you like, legally it is just another day.
https://cooleypubco.com/2016/07/25/new-study-shows-inverse-c...
WHAT'S THE BASELINE?!
It could well be that 50% of CEOs are always "considering" cutting jobs in the next 6 months. I mean, I suspect that this number is higher than usual because, well, it does look like we're heading into a recession. But if I'm interpreting this number based on my perception of the recession, then this number is useless at the main point of this article: informing me on whether we're heading into a recession or not.
They are not. CEOs are generally optimistic. this is a very bad sign. 99.99999% of knowing what someone will do is what they say. people try to read way too much into other things, "what were they really thinking? how has that changed over time?" etc etc. sometimes you just have to snap out of it and LISTEN.
and what you hear is very bad, and far from 'useless'.
as far as whether we are heading into a recession or not, we are not. We are already in a recession. We've had 2 quarters of shrinking GDP. maybe we notch a positive quarter in between the next negative quarter, but its a recession. stop over thinking it.
That definition of recession is not codified.
The official definition is that we’re in a recession only after an octogenarian declares it (retroactively of course).
Using the 2 quarters rule (something that has no official bearing) means that 2 of the last 3 recessions (2000 and 2020) weren't recessions.
Begin using the data > Section 1 Domestic Product and Income > Table 1.1.5 Gross Domestic Product > Modify > First year 2016 (refresh table)
Only two though-- Q2 was so sharp that everything after that was recovery.
It wouldn't be unusual for a major economic calamity to occur within a single quarter. Both Covid lock downs and the collapse of AIG/LB happened within a matter of weeks.
But that's not receding, that's has receded.
If your implied definition is slipping below the growth trend, then any '50% collapse' is going to ensure 'recession' (by this definition) for probably (or even hopefully) a long time.
A recession is past tense. One can speculate that we are in a recession, but it's not feasible to collect all the information necessary to make that determination in real time. The best one can do is say, "a recession started six months ago, and I think the situation is better/the same/worse."
Shift the quarter to begin in Feb and you'd only have 1Q of decline.
That is why the 2 quarters rule is stupid and why 2020 doesn't fit the rule.
It's just a rule of thumb, not some profound maxim of economics.
That said, you can apply the same to GP's suggestion of months, if the timescales are even shorter.
How convenient!
Almost every situation in history of 1 0 1 is considered a recession but 2011, but that one wasn't considered one because Obama was president. however, every time that I know of, back to back shrinking quarters has always been a recession, as far as I know.
And it matches up, we all know its a recession now (except those who want to deny its one because of their political view). its a recession, you only look more wrong trying to deny the obvious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Two periods of negative GDP growth without a rise in unemployment is unprecedented, but that is largely the result of bullwhip effects of the pandemic which was unprecedented.
The actual recession is going to be substantially worse.
The people who argue that we're in a recession right now due to two quarters of negative GDP growth while discounting the fact that every other indicator of the economy has been pretty healthy up until recently just makes me think "tell me you were too young to remember 2008/2001/1992/1982/1980 without telling me you were too young to remember".
IDK it is probably pointless to argue about this with people who will double-down on the strict definition that they think they know. Wait for another 12-24 months and let me know if it feels and order of magnitude worse or not.
(Agreed, though, that CEOs are generally almost naive optimists and that when they're all pessimistic about the economy it can almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy)
It primarily exists to give you a believable model that promotes behavior of the masses towards the interests of the owners of the company or nation state that controls it.
It primarily exists to give me a believable model that promotes your beliefs.
That kind of statement is literally true for everything.
> Nine in ten CEOs in the U.S. (91%) believe a recession will arrive in the coming 12 months, while 86% of CEOs globally feel the same way
- So what? Most CEOs I know cannot foresee what they will eat tomorrow. No offence, but being CEO makes you no better at predicting the future as the janitor. "They have, more info, experience" yada yada... I knew just too many incompetent CEOs.
Also, what does it mean, cutting jobs... how many? why? which ones?
Seems like content, but completely empty.
Here is an interesting thought experiment: if McKinsey wanted to force a recession, could they invoke one by telling all the CEOs the worst possible news and making terrible recommendations?
No, really, most people have a stake one way or another, and when presented a chance to influence the populace, by making people afraid of losing their jobs and making other CEOs afraid of hiring like crazy, they’ll say the line whether it’s true or false.
This recession is a self fulfilling prophecy intentionally triggered by the Fed at the behest of Congress behind the scenes to curtail the public meta mind technology companies were creating via social media.
Don’t stop doing. There’s no reason our agency must be coupled to macro economic views of a coddled minority. The public gifts them their hallucination of being a valuable member of society. We don’t have to coddle their figurative identity.
Do you mind expanding on your statement that the current actions of the fed/congress are a reaction to technology companies?
Seems a bit circular to me.
We're not smarter than everyone else. No, we're just more clued in to what's happening with our capital markets, vendors, competitors, and customers.
Try to be forward thinking about what trends might be coming. It used to be easier to do this but now everyone hops on trends quickly so it's harder to maintain a head start.
I'm looking at my next venture right now and I'm mostly focused on the overall macro picture surrounding the growth prospects of an industry. Things like population dynamics are playing a bigger part of how I see opportunity. The best CEO won't accomplish much in a dying or flat industry.
Ignore people who say "X is saturated". Everything is saturated. What matters is if the market is going to grow.
Now I'm more focused on wealth deployment and preservation and trying to focus less on building new things. Building is where my passion is but it's high risk and I don't need to be taking risks anymore.
This is a company that I know previously to be quite ethical, yet here they are doing dirty tricks. Market falls can be a threat to companies, but by engaging with propaganda trolls can influence the market and make money. Read any mortgage or real estate propaganda and you'll see they're all using the same words, false comparisons, etc. Maybe the true signal of a recession is the defiance of admitting there is a recession.
I ended up asking my real estate agent for suggestions and she suggested a local hole in the wall originator that gave me significantly better rates than anyone else.
It’s stunning to me that people will outsource all decision making to an app they saw in an advert, for their most expensive life purchase.
Their rates are terrible, and even light research would show they were uncompetitive, but it seems many americans value convenience over common sense.
look at consumer debt levels and how several major banks in Europe are ready to blow up, not a sign of a healthy economy. Unemployment rates are a lagging indicator for recessions, companies don't start laying people off until revenue takes a hit. The Fed has outright said they are going to keep raising rates until people start losing jobs so inflation declines.
Another more conspiratorial take. Since wage growth finally started again for the average worker, talks of recession are an attempt to crush that growth.
1 - Hire assuming people work < 8 hr day. 2 - Don't overburden them. 3 - Don't try to drive hyper-productivity. 4 - Do manage people for results; counsel those who are not performing at level* and yes, fire them if you can't help them get going.
* See point 2
Results (in my experience):
A - Less turnover B - Better quality (because people have time to think; less technical debt because less "I'm exhausted so let's just ship it" C - People have useful ideas because they have some time to think D - Customers happier; revenue more dependable E - in the inevitable but rare times there is a crunch people are more likely to have the energy for it and understand why/how it happened.
At least, this has always worked for me, as some other HN commenters can corroborate.
“92% of WeWork users are considering upgrading their home Internet speeds.”
We need a mechanism for scrutinising these media workers. They negatively influence our daily lives and are as much if not more corrupt than politicians. Wondering how much bribe marketwatch took for slipping in this crap?