BernankesBeard t1_jcifp4u wrote on March 17, 2023 at 1:29 AM

Reply to comment by pobody in Former Meta employee says staff were 'hoarded like Pokémon cards' by nastyjman

This is almost as crazy as the person in this sub who told me that the Big Tech firms were firing people in the hopes that their couple thousands of layoffs would cause unemployment to rise by enough to get the Fed to hold off on further rate hikes.

extra-texture t1_jciv682 wrote on March 17, 2023 at 3:34 AM

not to discredit the comment as it’s still a fraction of the population, but tech layoffs in just the few months of 2023 are almost 100k

BernankesBeard t1_jciw2ib wrote on March 17, 2023 at 3:42 AM

Correct. All the layoffs in the entire tech sector amount to that much out of a total US labor force of ~166m.

So if the whole tech sector got together and agreed to fire workers in a mustache-twirling, 17-dimensional chess move to stop the Fed from raising rates, then they would have managed to raised unemployment by 0.06 percentage points.

extra-texture t1_jciwbzw wrote on March 17, 2023 at 3:44 AM

yea your original comment is still valid, just wanted to make a little correction to the ‘couple thousand’ line :)

CryptographerOdd299 t1_jcjr7e2 wrote on March 17, 2023 at 10:17 AM

It's an attempt to cut costs because of rising interest rates. All big organisations have big waste. Plenty of room for improvement. Tech is no exception.

BernankesBeard t1_jckmric wrote on March 17, 2023 at 2:58 PM

Right, I mean that would be the normal, non-conspiracy theory for what's going on

dimechimes t1_jcmbu1s wrote on March 17, 2023 at 9:35 PM

They're probably a little confused as recent strong job numbers caused the market to slide a few weeks back because that meant rate hikes wouldn't stop.

So if you reverse that logic, if everyone started getting unemployed then the rate hikes would stop. Like I know it isn't that simple, but I can see where someone would come up with that idea.