It's quite simple: If you don't follow the herd, you risk being blamed if you fail. But if you follow the herd and do what everyone else is doing, even if the herd runs off of a cliff, nobody points any fingers.

You'd think somewhere, in at least one of these larger tech companies, there would be a leader boldly proclaiming "this is our time to increase our investments and beat our competitors!" But it turns out there is even less diversity of thought in tech leadership than there is racial and gender diversity.

It makes me sad. These are actual human beings losing their jobs. I guess they don't include “human cost” or “how much pain we inflicted” as a column in financial reports.

In many cases, these were people they shouldn’t have hired in the first place. When the herd said “hire 10% more employees!” the same lemmings did as the herd commanded.

It certainly isn’t the fault of those being hired, but it might have given them a chance to find employment somewhere that truly needed their skills and didn’t see them as “headcount”.

Do you feel bad for the minimum wage and non w2 people whose jobs you automate away being in tech?

I’m a highly paid tech employee and idk it’s different feeling bad for someone who lost their $10/hr job vs someone making 400k tc

Non-engineers are being let go as well.

True but still I mean being a w2 employee at big tech is a pretty good gig.

No, because the rising tide of automation should, at least ostensibly, lift all boats. If the extra utility created by automation is captured by technocrats, that’s a political and social problem, not a technical one. Pointing out the ways that technology can be abused isn’t an argument against technology - it’s an argument against abuse, and for governance that optimizes the wellbeing of constituents.

Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM.

Exactly what came to mind.

If you do what everybody else does, you can blame outside factors if it goes wrong.

If you decide to be the one that _doesn't_ follow the trend, if it goes wrong, the blame falls on you.

Companies hire in a frenzy based off future growth, esp. in tech, not exactly always current needs. How many times have you heard a recruiter or someone say in a company all-hands that we're going to grow our engineering team 300% by EOY, or TRIPLE our headcount.

20-22 there was basically infinite cash sloshing around the system. If your competitors takes advantage of that, hire like crazy to build out and innovate, what do you do?

Not saying it’s good management of a company, but that’s the mechanism driving this.