Roku: “Current economic conditions”
Cisco: "rebalance across the board"
Amazon: "unusual and uncertain macroeconomic environment”
Disney: “a targeted hiring freeze”
Meta: “macroeconomic downturn”
Salesforce: "performance issues”
Stripe: “stubborn inflation, energy shocks, higher interest rates, reduced investment budgets and sparser startup funding,”
Opendoor: "the most challenging real estate market in 40 years”
Once a company or two uses these phrases it become politically acceptable to repeat them because they have now been "vetted". Contrarian or outsider views are not well received most of the time despite all of us wanting to believe we're different/unique/contrarian.
Humans are such an interesting species.
Didn't the subprime mortgage crisis happen in 2007? The current situation is worse than that???
I think it's worse considering the inflation in food and gasoline. A 6 pack of beer at the grocery store is $10 now. 1 L of carrot juice is $6. It's unsustainable especially considering how wages barely moved for anyone. I don't see how people are getting by.
For a home owner selling and a realtor, the realtor likely has to compete to earn business but they are a third party to the transaction.
Seagate technologies: "global economic uncertainties"
Philips: "worsening macroeconomic environment"
Microsoft: "valuate our business priorities on a regular basis and make structural adjustments accordingly"
Intel: "sudden and rapid" economic decline
Twilio: workforce grew “too fast” and “without enough focus”
> "An increasingly competitive world"
I've worked at places that laid people off once a year. It's a common way to give managers a way to get rid of under performing employees without the hassle of going through a PIP. The manager gets rid of a bad fit, the employee gets some severance, so both sides get something.
But since this is happening at the same time as other companies doing layoffs it can seem like it's all occuring for the same reasons.
For example, if you've been working on a database system for 8 years, there aren't that many companies that need to develop their own internal database system so the matches are slimmer. Or if you've been doing SRE on 1k k8s clusters, there aren't that many companies that are doing k8s at that scale and working at lower scales is completely different.
Another thing with going from a mega corp to a startup/smaller business is the expected performance. Mega corps are slower with low acceptance of errors while smaller businesses are faster with a higher acceptance of errors.
This doesn't even factor in that it also seems like smaller companies are also doing downsizing at the moment. I'm seeing smaller companies add in policies which are clearly designed to make people want to quit to companies getting rid of all of their remote devs because they're the easiest to fire. The job market doesn't look good right now.
But it does matter for people who are employed and looking for jobs. If you are unhappy and/or underpaid at your current job, layoffs all caused by larger market forces might be interpreted as a hint that you should think about staying at a "safe" job unless you really hate it. However, if some significant portion of the the layoffs is due to recent over-hiring and that has now swung the other way into layoffs, changing jobs might be less risky.
Another reason to favor worker-owned co-ops rather than publicly-traded companies.
This seems weird though because I have no doubt that every financial analyst at each of these companies saw the incoming downturn a mile away. If it was just a few of the companies making recent questionable decisions (Twitter, meta) it would make more sense to me, but the list of companies laying people off keeps growing.
What's ironic I remember articles actually predicting that at the end of the pandemic people will not go back to offices and would rather quit than work inside the office again.
But here we are, companies firing en masse
