Still, as far as tech goes, for some companies that relied on cheap money, the ride may well be over ( I think of weird products like Peleton, which is a niche product, but was scaled as if it was going to become a thing in every house ). I am not sure it translates to everything going out with a bang.
Today's news were that job market[1] is still fine despite clear attempts to make it employer's market again.
[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/04/jolts-report-november-2022.h...
Wrong. not only surplus employees but surplus elites.
in recent years, big tech paid bloated compensations to people producing little or no economic value. saw first hand professional managers dont understand tech get hired by friends and collectively engage in empire building and building head count. easy promotion game.
engineers create complexity for smallest problem and launch new services. get promoted. then they get hell out and move to new team. managers willingly accept tech debt to justify more head count hire more managers and engineers under them.
you tell us what innovation come out of amazon fire alexa kindle. same thing they sold 5 years ago same hardware maybe little bit better speaker. why pay for increasing army of engineers? and me just discussing amazon devices.
how many engineers you need to run website? has shopping gotten better in 5 years? No! it way worse, too many ads.
this a massive grift. Most value amazon gets is these people don’t start their own company and threat amazon with competition.
big tech took advantage of cheap or free money from US Fed and created class of elites. Now the game ending for now anyway
I think this is just availability bias. Ordinary people - the ones who aren't glued to CNBC or the WSJ - tend to measure the strength of the economy by the job market for their friends and neighbors. The job market, right now, is pretty strong for ordinary people. Hence it "feels" like boom times, and that all the chicken littles are nuts.
Here in Silicon Valley, working for a FAANG, it's definitely recession time. And interestingly, it seems like the higher you get up the corporate ladder, the more you're worried. The ordinary employees basically just do their jobs and gripe about how bonuses are smaller this year, holiday parties are wimpier, and travel budgets have been cut. Managers complain about how we have to stack-rank employees and fret about whether we'll eventually have to execute a layoff. Directors worry about how their headcount and budgets have been cut. Our CEO seems visibly anxious.
I've learned that it's a bad sign when the people with the most information are the most worried. My cue to stock up on toilet paper pre-COVID was when I heard a leak that the CDC had told all their own employees to make sure they had at least a 3 month stock of everything. I realized the Ukraine war was serious when Biden snapped "We're trying to avoid WW3 here" while the official party line was that this was a regional conflict that would be over in a couple weeks. I'm a bit worried about this Bay Area storm going on right now because the meteorologists seem more freaked out than the general public. Similarly, it's worrying when CEOs are more anxious than their employees about economic conditions.
The popular narrative is that these are just a bunch of bloated tech companies laying off surplus employees that don't do anything useful. I don't buy that. I think the American populace has no idea what's about to hit them, and the economy's going to go straight off a cliff in 2023H1.