[MentallyRetired]

I think this tech downturn is all a collusion amongst tech leaders to bring down software developer salaries. How are so many places hiring yet so many are laying off thousands, and most of them in tech/development? Even the places laying people off are still hiring those positions.

[noodle]

Well, to give you my POV - my company is still hiring because the business fundamentals are still strong. We're making money and using that money to pay people. But I have friends in network who had to lay off because they were hiring against VC cash instead of revenue, with the expectation of raising another round later. But they now don't expect to be able to raise that next round so easily so they have to slow their burn rates.

Money WAS cheap and easy for a while, and with everyone trying to use that money to grow, you could throw cash around easy to hire/poach/etc. and had to compete heavily for talent. Now you can't, money is much more expensive and tougher to get and you have to be more deliberate.

[vasili111]

> Money WAS cheap and easy for a while, and with everyone trying to use that money to grow, you could throw cash around easy to hire/poach/etc. and had to compete heavily for talent. Now you can't, money is much more expensive and tougher to get and you have to be more deliberate.

Why it changed? What happened?

[hn_throwaway_99]

What you call "collusion" is what economists call "the market". Collusion doesn't even make sense here when it's so broad based. I could entertain collusion if it were a relatively small number of companies, e.g. in the Apple/Google etc. anti-poaching case. But here tons of companies had layoffs, and it's not hard to see why:

1. There was a ton of over hiring done during the pandemic. I don't think anyone really denies this. We were getting close to the "anyone that can fog a mirror" bar that I last saw during the .com boom.

2. Most people don't understand how the raise in interest rates makes it much more difficult to defend additional headcount even for companies that are hugely profitable. I won't go into the full economic theory, but the short of it is that when cash now earns ~5%, the bar for what new projects need to earn also shoots up. Obviously when cash was earning nothing people were much more willing to make highly speculative investments.

There is no collusion, and I think a lot of folks who didn't start in the job market until after the Great Recession never saw a downturn.

In a note of optimism, I'd argue that I heard all the exact same things during the .com crash, e.g. "they're going to ship all our jobs to India." Yet software dev salaries absolutely exploded in the past 2 decades since. I've talked to some folks who have already seen a marked improvement in the job market over the past month or so - not stellar by any means, but not as awful as it was earlier in the year. In other words, I'm really confident "this too shall pass."

[jorts]

More like everyone realized that they can trim down to improve margins without taking a lot of flack.

[polishdude20]

Yep, fire the devs after they've built the software. Fire them because the software is already built. Slowly your software grinds to a halt and dies because you release features too slow or your software starts to become very bad.

[downrightmike]

Both

[shiftpgdn]

Tech leaders colluding with the government by abusing the H1B program and ultra-lax enforcement of anti-trust laws to absolutely crater tech salaries has been the name of the game for 15+ years.

[scarface_74]

The number of H1B visas in relationship to the entire market is just a drop in the bucket.

[hattmall]

The overall quality of an individual employee has declined considerably. Mass hiring and layoffs are to an extent part of a more elaborate hiring process. Right now market dynamics are making this possible but as things tighten up there will be salary depression and more intern type roles coming back as the "hiring" process gets extended where previously it was compressed.

[hunterhod]

How would such a joint-coordinated effort work? Is such collusion possible at this scale?

[pkaye]

I don't think its collusion but its possible when one major tech company does it the others think its safe to do it too. But I also think many of these companies over-hired during the pandemic and even with the layoffs have more employees that pre pandemic.

[foobiekr]

Well, one arm of it is the H1-b program.

[trimethylpurine]

People are spending less time on social media so web marketing spend is down. Businesses are focusing on event based marketing. Web marketing is a very large part of the demand for front end. That's not collusion, it's basic economics.

[throwaway5371]

not really

it turns out you need half the people to do the same job