
1100 layoffs at Bay Area tech companies - dawhizkid
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/03/27/tech-layoffs-to-top-1000-in-bay-area-by-late-may-state-reports-show/
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WhiteSource1
Left out Imperva, which was bought by Thoma Bravo in January. 150 people let
go while the CEO makes $15 million.

Mismanaged incentives - employees don't matter, just shareholders.

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stevholt
Just make the employees shareholders

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coldtea
Well, that's the idea of Marx.

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roenxi
Marx had a lot of ideas; some of them were probably good. Involving workers in
the ownership of companies seems like a good idea even if Marx supported it.

Marxism as practiced in places like, eg, Russia fell down because they
disrupted the ability of the market to send and receive accurate price signals
and over time that led to catastrophically misallocated resources. Many of the
people who want socialism seem to support disabling said price signals,
because they are unfair, which is why socialism is so dangerous - those price
signals are very important. However, as long as they face the same risk of
bankruptcy as everyone else, workers co-ops with the ability for outsiders to
invest are probably a superior model of ownership.

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49531
> Russia fell down because they disrupted the ability of the market to send
> and receive accurate price signals and over time that led to
> catastrophically misallocated resources.

This is extremely ahistorical. The fall of the USSR was due to Gorbachev's
decision to introduce "western" markets into Russia and Yeltsin's opportunism.
Growth and stability weren't flagging in the Soviet Union until they attempted
to privatize.

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maxxxxx
They were slowly decaying like Cuba is doing now. Same for East Germany. There
wasn’t much growth going on. Stability only in the sense of stagnation.

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49531
Infinite growth isn't necessarily the best way to measure success unless
you're an investor. When we frame the world in that way a lot of "good"
economies are harsh to live under, and "decaying" economies aren't bad from a
quality of life standpoint.

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magduf
The Soviet-era economies were generally horrible to live under from everything
I've read and heard, even from people who actually lived under them. Did you?
There's a reason they wouldn't let people leave East Germany, and actually
shot them if they tried, and why those people risked their lives regardless to
get out, and also why almost no one from the West ever tried to "escape" to
Soviet-bloc countries.

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jchallis
Creative destruction in practice. Older firms like Oracle / SAP reducing
headcount, while newer firms are adding headcount with a net increase in high
quality jobs.

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skrebbel
SAP isn't a "Bay Area tech company" though.

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_Codemonkeyism
When you drive down to San Jose you'll see several companies with a SAP logo
who have been bought in the last 10 years in the HR space, e.g. SuccessFactors
(2011).

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mathattack
And if your company uses SuccessFactors you can see how little they’ve
invested in engineering lately.

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maxxxxx
It always amazes how bad enterprise systems can be. My company uses
SuccessFactors and also a thing called Windchill. After seeing how convoluted
Windchill is you will think that SuccessFactors is actually quite decent.
Kronos is also a great case study in terrible design.

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xkcd-sucks
Working at a startup that does b2b software it's pretty clear. "Tail wags the
dog" development and placing the highest priority on C-level personal
relationships

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mathattack
I think it’s caused by a few things:

\- Enterprise software CEOs are more likely to come from Sales than their
consumer counterparts.

\- Enterprise software has more lock-in. Ones the market is saturated, their
best financial move frequently is to milk the existing base rather than
improve things. (This is why one should avoid long term contracts like the
plague)

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byset
Amy context to this? Is it an unusually large number of tech company layoffs?

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jchallis
For Oracle this is a tiny change : <200 laid off of a work force of 140,000
globally. Instacart seems to be a much bigger proportional change, due to the
termination of its relationship with Whole Foods.

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cetico
Oracle cut 1,500 globally. These numbers are for Bay Area only.

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IloveHN84
Too expensive salaries? It's funny to see promises such as 400K$/year
(compared vs. the rest of the world) and hear stories like this

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wgerard
The places where you're promised total comp like that (e.g. FAANG) are not the
places laying people off in this article.

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hashberry
Do these companies foresee an upcoming recession? It seems big companies
always try to tighten up before a recession becomes "official."

