> don’t want to bury the lede: after today Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics;
Does that mean layoffs AND part of their company being sold off.
Or does it mean employees being reassigned because part of the company is being sold off?
Granted I don't know much about Shopify.
But when I read things on the face of it ... it sounds confusing.
See: twitter
In 10 years when interest rates are 0 we can have the tulip Olympics again.
I agree with all the other comments criticizing the CEO's leadership of furiously hiring and now making massive cuts, but I think that is missing the context that the CEO does not answer to you or me, or to business professors, or to his employees. He answers to the board, which typically care about stock price and not much else. Today is a massive success in that regard.
Is this on top of the layoff they had a few months ago? That means Shopify is really about 30% smaller all told.
Am I reading this right that they decided they had too many managers, and are laying off some? They don't say it clearly in which direction they thought they were unbalanced, but I think that's the implication of "activities rather than crafter-driven outcomes", or just what is supposed to be the obvious answer when anyone says this is unbalanced?
> too many and you add heavy layers of process, approvals, meetings and… side quests (emphasis mine)
and
> A more fit for purpose Shopify centered on its main quest has less scope creep, fewer meetings, and more shipping great features for our merchants. (emphasis mine)
https://shopify.engineering/shopify-ruby-at-scale-research-i...
I don't understand the point of a statement like this. Why not just admit logistics turned out to be a sunk cost and you're abandoning it, rather than say "We actually killed it!"
Shipping is getting expensive across the board, which might be part of it.
Big part of what drove me off was that the software project management (at least for my team) felt like someone was mashing on the control panel, figuratively.
As a small-business Shopify merchant, I would appreciate more competition in the market.
Genuine question: Isn't it a pretty crowded space? Do not SquareSpace, Square, Wix all have variations of Shopify products/offerings?
Wix/Squarespace, at least last time I checked, treated e-commerce as an add-on to their core service (building websites.) Square is a payment processor which with an e-commerce add-on, but is heavily templated.
Disclosure: my current employer
Then he says they're selling to Flexport, an act which doesn't sound like a "main quest" at all ... it sounds like it's a difficult side quest being offloaded to someone else.
For Shopify customers: What does this mean for shops using Shopify Fulfillment Network?
The bigger picture here is that Shopifys visions of becoming an aggregate Amazon and competing in this space are dwindling.
Sad as there is a real solution waiting here.
I know this sounds insensitive but I am slightly envious
Edit: am dumbass. plus one week per year of tenure as corrected below. Still not bad IMO
You could be over 50 work for a month and be entitled to 9 months pay. Talk to a lawyer before you sign
For example, in the passive sentence "The tree was pulled down", the subject (the tree) denotes the patient rather than the agent of the action. In contrast, the sentences "Someone pulled down the tree" and "The tree is down" are active sentences.
I enjoyed working there, but especially the people I worked with. I will miss working with them.
Would imagine Shopify is taking a loss in offloading, but will prevent future hemorrhaging of cash from a business decision that clearly did not pay off like anticipated.
Unlike some people, I don't think this experiment was necessarily a bad one for Shopify. I would have to know inside info as to whether it made sense at the time to do, but barring that I would give the benefit of the doubt to Shopify to try, if the reward was high enough if they pulled it off...
The main quest / side quest analogy works so so well!
Expected: 'Shopify lays off 20%'
Actual: 'Shopify will be smaller by about 20%'
It arose from the assumption that managers have finite amounts of time and energy to spend with their people and their jobs.
Analyzing British military leaders, Hamilton found that the leaders could not effectively control more than 3-6 people. These figures have been generally accepted as the "rule of thumb" for span of control ever since, at least in the military where the bulk of my management experience lies.
Research that I have seen hints that people who were in I shaped teams (i.e. single person reporting to a manager) and V shaped teams (2 people reporting to a manager) were much unhappier than larger teams.
Similarly, somewhere close to 10 is when the there is just not enough 'managing' or mentorship happening. I have seen that work only in cases where most of the ICs are senior/staff level and are effectively self-managing.
An organization that has nothing but fairly senior researchers working on separate projects might need little management. An organization with lots of more junior engineers working on something like a rocket (where every part depends on every other part) might need more overhead.
Unrelated, I think that we should stop calling workers individual contributors. I think "workers" is a more fitting description.
"Individual contributor" makes the worker seem smaller and less impactful, as if management is contributing in a way that's superior and bigger than the individual. In reality, only the workers work, and managers manage, doing less work the higher up on the ladder they go.
Don't believe me? Here's a list of CEOs that somehow managed to be CEO of multiple companies at once.
- Jack Dorsey
- Jeff Bezos
- Elon Musk
- Carlos Ghosn
And yet, my employer forbids me from having more than one day job.
Also there is benefit of flat orgs which comes with higher ratio in terms of meeting reduction and also communication efficiency both top down and bottom up.
Back in 2019, I was contacted by Shopify for a job opportunity. After acing multiple remote interviews, their recruiter couldn't contain their excitement. They promised me an onsite interview to simply meet the team and potentially secure an offer.
Imagine my surprise when, after enduring a 15-hour economy class flight with barely any time to recover, I received a call from the recruiter. They casually informed me that the team had decided to put me through five grueling back-to-back interviews, including a whiteboard session and a pair programming assignment. Despite my lack of a laptop, they assured me one would be provided.
What followed was an unmitigated disaster. The first interview bombarded me with ecommerce questions, completely unrelated to my field of expertise. The pair programming session was a nightmare, as I was handed a barely functional laptop that delayed the start by 20 minutes, and then given just 30 minutes to complete the task without any assistance.
Bear in mind, I was already physically and mentally drained from the arduous journey.
While the remaining interviews were passable, they were nothing to brag about. After being sent home with the promise of a call, I received a cold rejection a week later, citing a lack of experience based on the onsite interviews.
Looking back, I'm grateful I didn't sacrifice everything for a company with a track record of questionable practices and frequent layoffs.
I respectfully declined, telling her that because I was going to do the same long trip about 2 months later, I didn't want to fly. I told her that I would understand if they decided to pass, and no hard feelings.
Instead, she got one of the founders to interview me (Bel!!) And after that they decided to give me an offer. Everything resulted great for all of us, and I had a job waiting for me later that year.
I understand we may be desperate when looking for a job. But trust me that hiring managers are also generally in a hurry to fill positions. I know this bc I've hired plenty of people (both tech, HR, and g&a) in my career.
When hiring people, I ended up making similar concessions for the right candidate.
Was that your first tech onsite? The onsite is an interview you have to pass, you're not guaranteed an offer. Also why did you not bring your laptop to your tech interview lol
Honestly, sucks to fly out far and get rejected but that's part of the process my guy. Most onsites are 5 back to back interviews.
For bigger orgs, this is a chance to sanity check team fit and potentially re-route if longer-term interests align better with some other team. For startups, it can be more of a vibe check.
Why would I think I'd need to go over another round of interviews after spending over 4 hours interviewing remotely, plus interviewing with engineers, to do it all over again?
I have several reasons for not bringing my personal hardware to a corporate interview, and a couple about the specific situation as described:
* I wouldn't travel with my laptop to an on-site that was described as a meet-and-greet.
* The recruiter promised suitable hardware would be available at the surprise technical on-site interview: "Despite my lack of a laptop, they assured me one would be provided."
* For many companies processing corporate data on personal, not-managed-by-the-business hardware is a firing offense.
* Grabassery happens, but if it's clear that my potential employer is an established company that is unable to plan ahead far enough to ensure that the interview has the hardware and personnel required for the interview, that's a _huge_ red flag for me... and one that's good to get out of the way early.
I’m not really “in tech” but this sounds like some bullshit for me. What if you don’t have a personal laptop? All I’ve got is a desktop machine, because my personal devices aren't for work.
> Most onsites are 5 back to back interviews.
What an absurd practice.
After after going through a whole crapload of interviews, "most" onsites definitely are not 5 hours. They certainly are a thing. Some are even longer. But out of around 25 interviews, only three places requested that much time (I declined two of them).
Remote interviews are generally phone screens. Aka just weeding out candidates.
On site interviews are the real killer.
But it’s easy for me to believe that the recruiter deliberately mislead the candidate about the on-site. I have experienced on-sites that were indeed more about meeting the team, having more casual technical discussions and being judged for “culture fit” (which has its own problems, but that’s another discussion).
It’s not unreasonable to take the recruiter at their word and be upset about the unexpected challenge, especially after a rough travel itinerary.
The role I’m currently hiring for, the face to face literally is just a meet and greet. All the technical stuff will be done remotely.
Also I wouldnt be surprised if the recruiter lied. I’ve had so many negative experiences with recruiters over the years that I’ve learned to trust very few and those who I do trust I now work exclusively with.
One of them was a zoom call THAT I WAS ON BY MYSELF AND BEING RECORDED. I was told it was going to be a three hour pairing exercise and _after the interview started_ dude told me he would be available for questions but ultimately wouldn't be involved. I'm still angry at myself for agreeing to go through with that.
After that I had a second phone screen with the same recruiter - which I suppose was some sort of behavioral interview? I failed because I got the rejection after that with no feedback. Looking back, I got the impression they already had someone in mind but needed to tick some boxes or something - like show they interviewed multiple people for the role.
Knowing a few people that do work at Shopify I get the impression they are very particular about their cultural fit so maybe that was it.
Whenever I hear this, I immediately think "dick measuring contest" and take the team far less seriously. A lot of these companies think they're training astronauts for the dregs of space when really they're just trying to build efficient database apps.
> “There’s no cuts coming for us,” Harley Finkelstein told The Canadian Press. “We’re in a really good place.”
https://globalnews.ca/news/9494197/shopify-outlook-no-layoff...
Once a coach has to say "[player] has my absolute confidence in their success," you know the player is ~2 weeks from being benched.
Or a sign of the kind of delusional optimism that leads to over-hiring.
What a way to lead, and what an absolutely grotesque euphemism (not to mention a barbaricly tortuous use of English). Why do companies write like this? It's just awful.
I'm only half-joking when I suggest that if they'd taken this text and asked GPT-4 to rewrite it in a compassionate tone they'd have got a better result. (I say this having used GPT-4 quite regularly in recent weeks, although not for these kinds of purposes. It's quite impressive, along many axes, and I'm confident would have made a decent fist of this piece.)
EDIT: All right, I have to give some credit here. I've now had chance to read the full release and, whilst I don't love the RPG-esque references, I understand that this is fundamentally a piece of internal comms sent to a group of people who are probably used to discussing things in those terms (Lord, preserve us - not my bag). That aside, I thought a lot of the rest of the release was decent and the severance terms seem good, so I have to give props for that. I've left my first impression unedited because, if nothing else, it's an honest reaction to some quite poorly composed introductory remarks and on that basis certainly not entirely unfair.
It seems like these two facts should at least go out in different press releases on different days.
For Shopify, does anyone know whether the 20% figure includes the people leaving with the sale of SFN to Flexport?
Edit: just heard in the earnings call that the 20% headcount reduction does _not_ include the logistics teams going to Flexport.
Shopify was just a really fun place to work. And in part this was because they did a really good job of interviewing. Technical, yes, but in particular behaviorally.
So I can honestly say that many of the colleagues I know being let go are truly great colleagues. They were some of the most impactful people I worked with in my org (discovery) and they are a great get for any company.
People who mentored me, who work hard, and do high quality work, and people who really carried the best of culture of the company (both technical and personal culture).
Really a shame to see this happen.
I'm bummed to hear about the layoffs, I hope the culture doesn't suffer too much. Shopify Ottawa was genuinely warm and familiar in a way few tech offices are able to be.
https://techcouver.com/2021/01/06/shopify-to-double-engineer...
Aren’t CEOs paid ludicrously well to make long term decisions, rather than just flail around?
That’s drastically different. Most orgs that’ve run layoffs over the last few years have terminated access immediately, or even before informing those losing jobs.
This feels more human, and I hope it goes well for them.
It sucks because I really liked the company. I liked the culture. I liked the leadership style. I liked the mission. I genuinely think that company is doing good for the world, and making money in the process.
The challenge now is that the leadership have burned a lot of trust with the employees. They repeatedly said no more layoffs were coming, but with this move they all benefitted financially quite well- the stock is up 25%.
The move deeply undermines the company culture that they worked so hard to build. I hope Tobi has a plan for how to repair that damage.
Shame - Shopify is a fun place where I've learned a ton. We were just getting a cool Data product off the ground.
Well, if anybody's got a need for a Staff/Lead Data Engineer (Remote EST) with experience in Scala (+cats/fs2), Python, go who has spent the last 10+ years building Data Products on BI, then Hadoop, then GCP (+ the Apache Zoo, lately namely Kafka/Iceberg/Beam), my email is in my profile. :)
Have a great day!
Reaganomics has had 35 years. Maybe we need a new vision for our society.
Good people. Very few assholes. The mission feels good, like it's not a net negative on the planet. Lot of churn internally, but often handled in a positive way.
I'm fortunate that I've got a decent nest egg set aside, and I can afford to spend the rest of the summer just being with my wife and daughter. It sucks that it's happened but I'm not worried about the future (yet).
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/04/how-shopify-bungled-its-la...
Yeah, not as bad as the CEO laying off 900 people via zoom, and then plying for sympathies at how hard this decision is for him to do.
our entire economy is out of whack in so many areas.
>Our numbers were unhealthy, just like it is in much of the tech industry.
Ok, can we consider this in your compensation discussions this year? That you mindlessly followed the crowd and left your company structurally weak? Or do we think you're going to shoot for record compensation this year?
Many important revenue driving products have been mangled by having their teams entirely removed, with pages going completely unanswered.
In at least one case, it seems like an entire team was cut in error.
The company was seriously negatively impacted, but the share price hasn't budged. To the extent that share price is connected to reality, I imagine it will take while for the market to notice the impacts of a layoff
Businesses are path dependent, you can't just go "oh, not enough people hire more, oops! too many, fire some!".
That said: where do I sign up for 16 weeks of severance pay?
The cruel irony is that having Shopify on your resume will open a lot of doors and likely result in a shorter job search than those laid off from lower-profile companies with less severance.
For point of comparison, my no-name series-D gave us a little over two weeks… and I’m unfortunately still looking 20 weeks later.
Absolutely dreadful job search. Six months and nothing. A couple of awkward interviews that went nowhere. No one will touch me, and the few that do have pretty obvious issues. Meanwhile, friends that have well known names on their resume (even if it’s for infamy) are doing fine.
The picture painted in the media of these 'pampered' employees - true or not - does affect the perceptions of some hiring managers.
What're the workers gonna do? Protest? Strike? Hah. No, the remaining employees will pick up the extra responsibility and thank the employer for continuing to employ them.
They're going to work for other firms, who have also simultaneously laid off staff. They will accept lower wages. Salaries will be permanently anchored lower, improving the cost structure of US software across the industry.
It's an effective coordinated move by firms against labor.
Interesting side effect here is that in order for staff to avoid a layoff, the benchmark is not whether they produce output in excess of the risk-free return -- it's whether their worth is greater than the long-term benefit of paying each new hire 30% less.
I don't think that bad smell subsides that quick for everyone.
Know of a relatively well known brand that laid off a large chunk of it's tech staff and most / all the others are looking for routes out the door
Chunk of the tech leadership that took over after the original tech leadership was laid off have already found new roles
Growth also goes down, which means more firings and rinse and repeat.
- Alienating marketplace partners by trying to absorb their functionality - Trying to break into the logistics space - Failing to develop and make headway into the Enterprise space.
Shopify needs a reality check and new leadership if they want to continue being relevant
plenty relevant. more surprised when i don’t see a store use shopify at this point
Most recent layoffs have been framed around needing to focus the company due to economic and market headwinds. This reads like AI has transformed the mission.
What does "A copilot for entrepreneurship is now possible" mean here?
I guess their idea of AI is someone using the ChatGPT API. Good luck if they think they will "hack" some revolutionary AI together with a cowboy hacker culture.
I think this is what is meant here[1]. Not copilot, but the idea is the same.
It is interesting, because 'prompt engineering' is being discussed in the same context. In the video, you will note several interesting bugs generated by GPT. Is it not exciting to see all those bugs in the next few years?
What law? I’m not criticizing Spotify at all for this decision, I’m just genuinely curious. A few other companies recently are giving away the laptops so I’m wondering what is different here.
On one hand, it was really nice having a fulfillment partner directly related to the webstore. It gave a sense of harmony for future growth of services. From a stock perspective, it was a money suck, but hey, look at Amazon.
On the other hand, the Shopify web platform feels a little neglected and I hope this will allow them to re-focus. From a stock perspective, maybe this will help get their immediate finances in order.
They've made some solid improvements and additions, but there are a lot of little things that need attention. One of my quibbles is that you can't make private or unlisted products. They're either visible to everyone, or disabled. There are a lot of people asking for that feature, and it's not a hard one to implement. There are a lot of things like this that probably wouldn't take a lot of resources to implement but would significantly improve the merchant experience.
Most of these companies have 1-2 areas generating 90%+ of the revenue. They are the rich VC giving unprofitable teams money to find PMF. When those teams can't find profitability faster in this environment, the VC rightfully stops the funding.
Some people will/have moved to the profitable teams, but you can't just double or triple their size and expect their income to grow accordingly
Looking at it from their perspective, I would have made the choice to lay me off (or fire me). The reality is that I just did not get enough meaningful project work. I talked to my manager frequently and it was always something "just around the corner". My manager went on parental leave 3 months after I started. Pretty much everybody took most of December off. Our division did a re-org which shook everything up, wasted more time. I didn't get any meaningful projects until the start of February, my 6th month of employment at Shopify. I was doing really well there, felt good about my work and my contribution, whereas I'd been floundering for 6 months with impostor syndrome and existential crisis.
But it was just too late. I got the axe. I don't feel too personally bad about it, although I hate interviewing and have performance anxiety when it comes to technical interviewing stuff. I want to take time off to rest but I'm afraid I'll use all my savings up and still not have a job.
I wasn't there long enough to really know for certain, but I feel like part of the problem is the monolithic nature of the codebase. Getting projects greenlit required a bunch of political wrangling and convincing of the senior leadership team by the product folks. Things just moved really slowly. The "Get Shit Done" (I kid you not, that's what they call it) process of shipping projects seemed interesting but nobody really followed the documented process. I got the feeling it was a lot of back channel conversations, gate keeping by higher up folks, with people every step of the chain asking themselves, "Will this decision make me look more impactful in my upcoming review?". Kinda feels like the way I imagine the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union operated.
I don't know. I have a lot of feelings about all of it, I'm personally really sad because I feel like I really had something to offer, something to contribute, but I spent most of my time just fucking around. Scale that up to a company the size of Shopify and it's just a tragic waste of human potential. But they will just pat themselves on the back, congratulating themselves on "making difficult decisions".
The 16 weeks severance is nice though. Takes the edge off.
There are a number of consequences to this, and I don’t want to bury the lede: after today Shopify will be smaller by about 20% and Flexport will buy Shopify Logistics; this means some of you will leave Shopify today
So are they going to fire 20% of the C-suite and upper management as well? :)
It was genuinely Tobi. That's how he talks and writes. That's exactly the analogies he would use. No PR person anywhere would write this letter for him.
Also, he is wildly obsessed with LLMs. I would place a large money bet that he did have GPT help him edit this document.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/04/how-shopify-bungled-its-la...
> to pay unshared attention to our mission
...unshared attention?
You aren't the audience, that's why.
https://1fish2.github.io/buzzword-bingo/corp-bingo.html
none yet. Jerry's working on adding weights to the buzzwords.
Today, we're making some substantial changes at Shopify, all with the aim of focusing more intently on our mission. We believe these adjustments will help us better serve our community and we're excited about the journey ahead.
> Shopify to cut 20% of its workforce, beats an already/comparatively-to-history reduced/calibrated quarterly revenue estimates for the current economic landscape
The headline is to pitch possible future investors that Shopify will prioritize investor returns over anything else (as ordained by the Prophets of capitalism)
When Bezos was still at the helm of Amazon in the 2000s, the investors demanded a profit (and a dividend?). Not giving in, he kept reinvesting any earnings back in the business for years to come.
The current flavour of capitalism is more heavily tuned for profits over other parameters such as employee satisfaction and morale.
Still, seeing the same response across all companies in every industry is bizarre. This gives more credence to the big-three-index-funds-control-most-companies theory[1].
[1] Hidden power of the Big Three? Passive index funds, re-concentration of corporate ownership, and new financial risk https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-and-politic...
Put it this way - would you like to be paid to mow a lawn using scissors? I can pay hundreds of people to mow my lawn using scissors, and they will be employed as landscapers. Or I can pay one guy with a lawnmower.
If you are an employee, nothing management does is for you.
Sadly I got vetoed by one interviewer for an inelegant game of life solution (first time I’d ever seen GoL and I got bogged down in the middle logic) - never been so disappointed ever as every interview I had went really well on a personal level and (with the exception of that one) all my code was fine.
I hope to see Shopify continue to do well, I’ve used it for over 10 years and love using the platform.
CEO's are neither prophets nor oracles. They are effectively dice-rolls with a face. Not rollers, but rolls. No matter what, sometimes you get bad numbers.
Founder CEO's like Lutke are heroes. They have skin in the game. This forces them to calculate their risks. Their actions and decisions have greater weight because of this - their payday is not guaranteed, especially early on in the game.
Non-founder CEO's are rent-collectors. They have no skin in the game. Unlimited upside and no downside. They get a handsome payday no matter what.
Non-founder CEO's and the absence of skin in the game is what yields the bastardy that is modern corporatism: highly-paid people who can flail around all they want and still land on their feet.
In this case, Lutke made a bad bet, but with Shopify's success, he's at the point where the result of his bets have no impact on him. He already got his payday.
Then why are they compensated like they're gods?
"Back where you started" with a now highly demotivated team isn't quite back where you started.
When Shopify beings hiring again, they are going to be able to hire talent at a fraction of the price.
Also, this is largely a coordinated effort from activist investors specifically targeting large tech salaries. E.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-layoffs-cut-jobs-exce...
There is essentially a vicious cycle targeting tech compensation. Activist investors are convincing boards that they're overpaying their tech talent. Then those boards approve layoffs. Then those layoffs further lower salaries. Rinse and repeat.
The zeitgeist right now is that employee comp is/was simply too high. There have lots of murmurings lately that amount to that at many different levels of the capital chain. Perhaps what's interesting about now is that people are quite okay with saying it openly. Tech is an easy target since it is well-known, and the pandemic inflated the importance of tech artificially to some degree.
Fully grokking the idea that employee comp could be "too high" for the overall health of the economy really did a number on my economic worldview. Gone is the naive belief that rare/valuable skills secure higher salaries over a long period of time. I no longer trust employers to take care of me, and that getting better at building assets (in the form of products, mostly) is something to grow into to supplant and eventually buy out time spent working for someone else.
If you're going to suggest 9/10 is also a fraction or something I'll counter that 4/3 is also a fraction, and no one uses "a fraction of the price" to refer to an increase in price
Wouldn't it be the opposite? When the market recovers, they'll competing with everyone else for talent, when instead if they held onto their talent, they could be paying less.
What I've been told about Shopify is that they were seen as a good place to get "western" experience before jumping ship (often for folks who couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration) because they were already not very competitive with companies in the valley.
Is there evidence of this now?
What I see is a small fraction of the open roles I'm used to seeing.
Compensation, on the other hand, is the same at these big companies. If not even higher than it was a couple years ago.
AI is already displacing some people from their work. I hate both absolute capitalism and socialism/communism. How can AI help us find a sweet spot?
Shopify being a beneficiary of both the government mandated lockdowns and the Fed backed investment bubble really had no option but to dramatically increase headcount. Their business literally doubled from 2020-2021 due these actions.
To believe in 2021 that in 2022 the Fed would undergo the most aggressive tightening cycle in history triggering significant headwinds for both startups like Shopify and their small business customers was absurd. At the time the Fed was saying that they weren't "even thinking about thinking about raising rates" so you basically had to assume that Fed lacked all credibility.
I guess what I'm saying here is that there is a reason why so many companies got this wrong beyond incompetence. So if you don't like it you should consider redirecting your outrage.
It would mean that _not_ hiring aggressively in a high-inflation period is harmful to business. To me, that is far more interesting to think about than CEOs making dumb mistakes and not getting punished for it because life isn't fair...
Assuming you have some productive use for the incremental employees, the discounted returns from those employees' contributions are decreased by an uncertainty factor and by the risk-free interest rate. When that latter term is near zero, hiring is restricted by the uncertainty of their performance and projects assigned to, meaning you get a lot of hiring by sensible, data-driven management teams.
John Tuld : So, what you're telling me, is that the music is about to stop, and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism.
Peter Sullivan : Sir, I not sure that I would put it that way, but let me clarify using your analogy. What this model shows is the music, so to speak, just slowing. If the music were to stop, as you put it, then this model wouldn't even be close to that scenario. It would be considerably worse.
John Tuld : Let me tell you something, Mr. Sullivan. Do you care to know why I'm in this chair with you all? I mean, why I earn the big bucks.
Peter Sullivan : Yes.
John Tuld : I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence.
>>Our numbers were unhealthy, just like it is in much of the tech industry.
But that didn't prevent him from profiting from it nor from the layoffs.
To be completely honest, I've never been bullish on Shopify. To me it looked like a "mee too" play for investors that missed the boat on Amazon, Square and Stripe.
The last time I got laid off was from a fintech company while WFH. It went like:
8am: Mysterious all-hands appears on all our calendars
10am: All-hands happens, layoffs announced
10:45am: Meeting with my manager happens
11:00am: I'm mid-slack-message with my team trying to coordinate a quick goodbye zoom chat when my laptop is remote-wiped and all access was cut off.
I totally understand why you'd do that and don't really fault them, but it certainly was a bummer. If you can safely do otherwise, it's a really nice gesture.
Right now I can't access any Slack channels, I can't access Google Drive/Docs, I can't send an email to an external address. I can only DM people and email people in the company.
In about 15 minutes I'll be shut out entirely.
As far as such things go it seems like a reasonable balance of humane consideration and legal prudence.
This was a job I looked forward to each morning. It was just a fun place to work full of talented people and a great culture. There were exciting projects in the works and I wanted to keep being a part of them. My time was cut short and it's disappointing to say the least.
They tried to hire people who care and that showed in the daily interactions. It's in stark contrast to today's actions and I won't be so trusting again.
Best of luck to you!
I was around for layoffs last year and I found it very surprising that nobody made more noise about the fact that executives never shared the hard numbers they used to make their layoff decisions. I'll be very curious to hear chatter over the coming weeks around how they rationalize these layoffs.
If nothing else, stock prices tell a pretty cynical story.
You can't be serious... What good those bunch of [censored] could possibly do?
As a merchant - worst decision ever was made to work with them. Wasted tens of thousands of dollars for nothing. Everything is bad - tech, support, "dedicated manager", API, plainly everything is horrible.
good for the world... Seriously?
This is a cut throat game of capitalism, you do know that right? He's going to be rewarded for making these cuts. There is no downside for the winners.
Hope.....unfortunately that's not how the game is played. Unions, worker protections, and taxes on the wealthy those are real actionable goals.
Tobi has never given me the impression that he's a sociopath. It's part of why I wanted to work for Shopify. I used to joke that "'Shopify is the no assholes company.' 'But what about Kaz?' 'It's the no assholeS company- we're allowed one!'". But honestly, even my view on Kaz softened up over time.
Either the leadership at Shopify are genuinely nice people trying their best, or they are way better than the Amazon leadership at hiding their sociopathy. But either way, it felt nicer working for them.
The CEOs / Executives are literally appointed by the board who in turn are voted in by shareholders. It is their job to increase the share price.
The world is better of with efficient capital deployment.
So, I don't understand how the smartest people in this world don't understand the fundamental working of capital markets.
Note: it's the same shareholders that have allowed to get $200-$300k TCs when smart people around the world toil the same as you for $60k. So, you can't have it both ways
This is a meme that needs to die.
> The world is better of with efficient capital deployment.
Even if this were true, rising share prices don't necessarily indicate efficient deployment. Chasing short-term share price increases often incentivises behaviour detrimental to company in the long-term.
I see you're assigning this failure to reaganomics, are you then ready to assign all the successes to reaganomics too? i.e. The US became the largest exporter of IT and software, the US corporations put a computer in every home, then in every pocket, with US online companies being 90% of the top companies in the world.
Are you going to say that this is due to reaganomics too? Or only bad things get attributed to it?
Shopify is a Canadian company, not that it matters for my question.
If AI really kills as many jobs as predicted, we will definitely have to rethink society. It doesn't really make sense that a technology that improves overall productivity of society ends up making large segments of the population suffer. We need to find a way to have everybody benefit from progress and not just a few at the top.
Acting like they are civil institutions tasked with upholding the social fabric is absurd.
There are (very limited) lawful structures that try to make this happen, but much more is down to culture. In many (most?) countries it is considered shameful if a company prioritises shareholder value above everything else. I honestly believe the US is an exception in this regard. Unfortunately US culture is taking over.
- And now to go on a complete tangent: In the second part of "The Three Body Problem" trilogy, The Dark Forest, institutions are described that have both an operational officer and a political officer. The navy has an Admiral that decides the strategy, and a political officer that makes sure the Navy does the right thing. The same is then applied to companies. - I wonder if this is a model to apply to a capitalist society: Where you have a CEO doing their regular thing, but also a political officer making sure society is not disadvantaged. Hard to pull off without falling into totalitarianism I guess.
Don't like how they do it? Create your own company and run it how you want.... We live in a world where you can do that.
I definitely agree in situations where the company is doing poorly. If a company has found a way to become more efficient then bosses probably do deserve bonuses.
Management doesn't care about you, so anything that is about your comfort and well being is a scam.
Because some highly paid people lost their jobs we need a new vision for society? Sure, it sucks to be laid off but you talk as if there's mass unemployment and droves of people suddenly living in squalor. Don't be so dramatic.
In Jan/Feb posted the exact same job (an additional position) and got over 300 resumes including from ex-FAANG folks who we generally don't see applying).
Something sure has changed imo, and I also personally do believe things are about to get much, much worse for many people.
But even if that is not your intention, it can come out as dismissive. Many people do worry about the future for very good reasons.
"safety" stocks like AAPL are at or near all-time highs
real estate has budged slightly, but a rounding error off of the gains made in the last few years
even employment...tech hiring is getting hit but lots of other employers in retail, food & beverage are reporting record hiring and even wage increases
if there is a "crash", it hasn't happened yet
you may just end up with a sucky decade of stagflation...you are poorer every day, but just not dramatically so
The other headline is that LLM and ChatGPT is reshaping the tech landscape. Tech companies are laying off engineers so they can hire AI/LLM engineers to compete with ChatGPT. Based on my limited knowledge, OpenAI is head and shoulders above everyone else. Google's Bard is a distant second.
QoL for most Americans will continue to drop to match USA's precipitous decline in geopolitical status, but even Russia rebounded after just a couple decades. Hey, we got a bunch of O&G as well.
It would be difficult for a IT department to guarantee, for sure without replacing the internals of the device, that the device doesn't contain sensitive information. Probably easier from an inventory and IT security perspective to just capture every device than try and coordinate with individuals to reformat, etc.
(for the same reason, some companies outright destroy old devices instead of reselling.)
I too am guilty of using work laptop for personal work like shopping etc couple of times.
Personal anecdote:
one of my colleagues was recently discussing about replacing his 6 year old laptop that he rarely uses, one of our architects commented : "I don't understand why anyone would need a personal laptop at home. We can use our work laptop for anything that our mobile can't do". I was surprised to hear that from an architect and even more surprised to see many others nod in agreement.
Edit: fixed a typo
If they give away the laptop, it will be difficult to guarantee and verify that the data is wiped out entirely within whatever time frame they are aiming for. So, they want their property back.
Lots of possible reasons.
Indeed. If it takes 5 interviews after 4 hours of remote interviewing your hiring process is completely broken. Giant red flag.
They are treating you like an adult by giving you a nice severance package. I don’t understand the need for people to have companies admit they were wrong.
Lots of differences. #1 is Amazon was not losing tons of money. They were also doing something novel and building physical infrastructure. Investing in an online retail business when there were few others (none at Amazon scale) is far different than investing in one with tons of competitors and low barrier to entry.
>The current flavour of capitalism is more heavily tuned for profits over other parameters such as employee satisfaction and morale.
People have always like more money than less money.
That it is unpleasant for the potential hire doesn't really say much about the interests of Shopify. For senior engineers this probably is a bad strategy, but maybe not for entry-level or intermediate engineer who they will push around for a few years. Forcing you to jump through hoops may actually get them exactly the kind of employee they want.
If that's a useful thing for your software development company to do, it is a bad place to work and it should work to improve it.
1) wage suppression
2) by hostile take overs inside the company by MBAs, the phase lag between the layoffs and impact on velocity or the bottom line is too long. The second order fire that comes months later gives them an option to look like a hero again.
Most MBAs burn an asset for a short term gain. Period.
If I were a senior government official or in some other high profile/sensitive role I'd probably be more conservative but it's pretty common to use some combination of personal and business-issued devices for everything.
But what is going away, permanently, is the space between extremes. Pour one out. I miss it already.
I intend to be an under the radar B- player at a diversified portfolio of companies until I can retire.
But they also captain their first large enterprises: do they know what they're doing? Can they transition these firms into businesses that will endure? Or will they capriciously chase shiny objects while they waste the trust and goodwill of investors, the people who work there now, and the people who will want to work there in the future? They might have seeded the garden, but it took thousands of smart people to build it up, and it takes a constant supply to maintain it.
A new CEO will probably be rich, sure, but not "endow a historical dynasty" rich, and might know how to take a successful company and reposition it for the long term. Maybe the younger guys can do it. But it would just be for vanity at this point.
Musk has reminded me that even billionaires are one accidentally legally binding agreement away from pissing away $40B
If the board thinks they are not doing their job, they will be fired.
How is it not difficult to understand for a self-appointed smart crowd?
Similarly, you don’t ask tech companies if they’re doing layoffs when the sector is booming.
That the question is even asked probably shoots the probability of benching/layoffs up to some ridiculous amount to begin with.
Coaches and players... they talk about each other a lot.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=taoiseach%20has%20full...
Might be true in other countries but I'm old enough to see this pattern play out a few times.
Meta/Google/Amazon/Microsoft are literally investing R&D $ that will pay off 10+ years later.
Yet they all have laid off people.
Just because you laid of people doesn't mean they aren't thinking long term.
Really how can reddit/HN and social media be so blind about this when they have data screaming at them?
> Really how can reddit/HN and social media be so blind about this when they have data screaming at them?
Maybe don't start with the assumption that everyone else is an idiot.
No-one owes anyone a living, but you don’t need anybody’s permission either.
Seeking to create artificial certainty in outcome leads to insurmountable stagnation.
Feels so incredibly backward.
And yes I know its "stock performance" but what do you think drives this? With executive compensation mostly related to stocks, of course at the end of the day, thats what they want to drive up.
While I agree that this is a naive belief to have (at this point in my career I think there's almost a slightly negative correlation between skill and TC) the general talent pool for software engineers has, at least in my experience, dropped tremendously while TC has exploded.
The most important skills for getting high paying jobs in the last few years has been grinding leet code, then grinding systems design etc, etc. Software engineers no longer have "rare/valuable" skills, they have highly commodified, easily replicable skills (at least at the interview level).
Software engineers today simply aren't that skilled (at least on average) despite what they want to believe. It reminds me a lot of dotcom bubble where anyone with a pulse that could turn on a PC could get a high paying job.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/25/britons-nee...
There is no tangible difference between being worth $1B and $100B beyond social cachet. It is impossible to spend meaningful money at that level.
Secondly, would you want to have a computer which your previous employer can wipe your disk at any time?
So all in all probably a good thing for both parties.
Plan for the future, good or bad, but don't dwell on what you can't control.
They affect me. I don’t give a fuck what the sun does everyday if I can’t pay my rent.
Easy not to worry when you can't fathom that it may happen to you or your peer.
"I'm so pissy because the US Fed isn't giving away free money anymore. I'm moving to cash and will shower money on any company that does layoffs."
Yeah, it works.
Yes, there can be recessions causes by world wars, worldwide droughts, pandemics and other cataclysmic events, but usually it's not the case for US.
Tech is a small part of the economy, but cities like Seattle that have built restaurants and services catering to the tech crowd will see further fallout. There was this idea that Seattle would be this next big metropolitan area, but tech implants have found it’s not for them after a few years
You can't have it both ways. Start misinformation about how capital markets work and not expect to be corrected.
HN is a discussion forum. If an incorrect fact or misguided opinion is shared, it will be debated.
I'm sympathetic to OP, but I also understand the dangers of misinformation and the resulting brainwashing of anti-capitalistic movement it causes and I will protect capitalism.
Truly the hero capitalism deserves.
democracy + socialism
democracy + capitalism.
One period marked poverty, child mortality, While the other marked good standard of living and reduced child mortality.
I'll let you guess and pick the confounding variable from the equation. That's the advantage of independent thinking vs brainwashed-by-liberal-universities (and thank god I didn't study in some brainwashed liberal university)
Companies are formed by shareholders to make money in some venture for the shareholders. People can pursue their social objectives through other types of organizations. Perhaps governments that impose regulations and taxes. I myself support moderate taxes and light regulations.
To the extent that companies focus on anything other than money for the owners, it is a failure by the owners to reign in the CEO. The CEO might want to get a fat paycheck for not much performance. The owners want to delegate everything to the CEO. After all, we’re all lazy humans.
So you would have no issue with owners lobbying to change the law so they make even more money, right? As you said, more money is the only goal.
What would you say if it's you who is worked to death? See, everybody thinks they will be an owner, a master if you will in this system. But it's more likely you would be another sla.... ahem... valued employee.
The richest countries all have strong rights, legally and also informally expected rights. The richest companies have confident people who have lots of options, not 12-hour-a-day slaves.
Because nowadays almost all money is made using the mind, so there’s a natural relationship between a higher human development index and my net worth. (I mean I’m a normal human with empathy who also enjoys other people doing well, but even a sociopath could see they’ll make more money in the US than in either a totalitarian state or a government-less state - North Korea vs Haiti).
But all that is besides the point. Companies are single-purpose entities. Like Unix programs - do one thing well. This is very hard, and goals should not be mixed. The one thing is making money for the shareholders by doing X.
For the type of worker protection you would argue for, you need other types of organizations like unions, governments, political parties, etc.
This is why you need capitalism and democracy to make a thriving society.
Who is choosing the CEO and political officer?
There's a reason Shopify on your resume opens a lot of doors. They don't compromise on engineering.
I'm as surprised as anyone how quickly, but I think it's a great thing to see
I settled into a role of research software engineer, where I do both applied research and development, applying a lot of compiler-ish stuff to different domains within cybersecurity, such as building out control flow graphs from binaries, thinking about how to instrument assembly code efficiently, fast pattern matching, and static analysis, where I am currently. The role fits me like a glove, but it isn't for everyone. In my job search, I started at, "I want a job doing compiler work," and eventually broadened scope a few times until I landed on, "I want a job where compiler-type approaches are on the table of possibilities." This offers a wider variety of work, which I like.
I can discuss more over email (check my HN profile) if you'd like, but most of what I know is US-centric due to how funding works for these types of research. Larger orgs like FAANGs also have it, but the pool is much more competitive, as you'd expect.
Those parts you mentioned like the static analysis or control flow graphs sounds cool
Would you prefer that companies be absolutely sure before they hire anyone to ensure layoffs never happen? It seems like the end result would be less hiring / more people without work.
Edit: I clearly misunderstood the above exchange
source: I was a Shopify employee until today and can confirm my salary was closer to FAANG than not.
there are no government engineering positions in Canada paying anywhere close to this
Shopify wasn't paying like FAANG, but also not like a startup. I would say 75% of a FAANG.
> “la de da nothing is wrong xd it is what it is” attitude
You misunderstood, no one above was taking that attitude.
Anyway, I'd encourage you to step back and examine your rage. It seems misplaced.
The interview was conducted by the recruiter and while she didn’t flat out ask personal questions, she asked questions that would almost cause me to reveal personal information such as my marital status and sexuality. It was not fun coming with made up responses to avoid that because it’s none of her business.
There’s a reason interviews should stay professional. I’m surprised they haven’t been sued.
But then again, that's probably why the environment seems 'fun'
Just because Shopify might name it something specific, doesn't mean it's all that unique. Some companies hold this potion entirely on a first/second phone call, others might having an initial section of the interview dedicated to talking about yourself and your experience.
Not sure how this weeds out non-native or non-extroverted people, both of whom are very capable of talking about their experiences. It would be great if you wouldn't infantilize them.
1. That is a very deterministic statement 2. This is a part of the process, not the entire process. There are still technical elements tested during the interview. 3. The signal that they are looking for, but do not tell candidates, is a story about overcoming obstacles.
What I will say about the lifestory, is that it aligns with the skillset required to do well in a corporate environment. Namely telling stories, being relatively interesting, and having some ability to sell yourself and your accomplishments (in addition to being technically competent which is tested elsewhere).
The answer to your question is it depends, and is one of the big things that has people worried about AI and automation rapidly improving over time. If things like wealth redistribution don't occur in a highly automated society you end up with big problems really quick.
Right, but that's not the actual dichotomy. First, if Shopify can deliver its software with less people, then with the same number of people they could deliver more.
Second, realistically the dichotomy, in the short to medium term, is will these people be employed in a skilled job, or will they be unemployed? You might say, that's not Shopify's problem. But let's not pretend unemployed people is "better for society".
That is assuming everyone contributes in a meaningful way. That might not be the case for various reasons: - Incompetence / lazyness - You feel productive, but you impact is actually really low ("I am preparing an alignment meeting") - You are working on a product / component that generates little to no revenue/interest (Hello "metaverse" team from Facebook) - Your skill are not highly required at the moment and don't seem to be required in a short/mid term; someone else surely needs you more.
Sometimes, doing more is not necessarily the right thing. 37 signals is famously known to have far enough revenues to hire a ton of guys and probably launch many new products. Yet, they choose to remain at a fixed headcount for now and return the profits to their shareholders. They do not hesitate to let people / fire them if they feel the need to despite their profits. Why can't Shopify follow the same strategy; albeit at a different headcount ?
The company leadership doesn’t believe that. There is a line where adding more people will not justify enough revenue increase, and that’s up to the company leaders to decide.
It’s worse for the people laid off, but ultimately wouldn’t they want to do something useful? In a new job they will be wanted. At Shopify they are not wanted.
This is difficult to believe. I think everyone sees signs all around them of foolish decisions by firm principals that hamper consumer and worker welfare even in the short term, to say nothing of the effect of various kinds of hysteresis on the long term development path of economies (e.g. detaching people from the labor market in a manner that undermines their health, currency of their skills, etc.)
How many software products has Google released over the years, which they're able to do so because they have a massive number of employees? More employees will allow for more products.
Whether it would be prudent or profitable to tackle more products is another story, but we're already talking about hypotheticals with 'infinite employees' here.
I do think there is room for 20% of its employees to work on other products that could integrate well with their vision and still be within the ecommerce realm. But that doesn't juice up their stock price right away.
Starting rather recently and suddenly, don’t you think? The company leadership did apparently believe that each and every time they made a hire. And I bet a lot of the people laid off today were hired fairly recently.
> then with the same number of people they could deliver more.
this is not true to begin with. classic engineering fallacy
Are you assuming they'd be put onto the existing projects (which may slow down delivery, yes) rather than doing new projects in parallel (which will not and will in fact let them deliver more because there are more projects)?
Are you excluding those 20% MFs that are getting fired from Society? Where are they gonna do their scissoring now?
The Luddites weren't idiots, nor they were against progress. They revolted because the way the new technology was applied was destroying their specialization, and in many cases, destroying their lives.
The promise of "reallocating skilled workers to new areas" is bullshit at the individual level. What's being reallocated is the new generation, the kids that grow to specialize in the new area instead of the old one. The specialists from the old area aren't being transferred along with rank and pay. They get to restart at the junior level, with commensurate pay, while they retain their age, their living costs, their families and other dependents. Even the kids of those "reallocated" old-timers aren't going to partake fully in the newly opened fields of work - they'll be weighed down by the fallout of their families suddenly dropping a level or two on the living standards ladder.
The Luddites rebelled because their lives were being destroyed. And the people who did the destruction? They didn't give two damns about what society will get out of it. They did it only because they saw a way to cut costs down and increase their own profits. You don't get to criticize Luddites for selfishness when the other side was just as selfish, if not more.
> As a society we allow layoffs because it reallocates skilled workers to new areas that actually need them
This more sounds like a trap mindset to me to be honest. Its associating some sort of morality to what is just regular part of running a business. Companies do what's best for the company and its investors first and foremost.
What specific measures of society are better?
Please use whatever metrics you deem relevant however I'll propose a few options to choose from based on the Harvard Human Flourishing Program [1]:
1. Happiness and life satisfaction
2. Mental and physical health
3. Meaning and purpose
4. Character and virtue
5. Close social relationships
Increasingly I wonder what this means. What KPIs are you evaluating to determine if society is getting better or worse? And is it?
If you are running a zombie company and just squeezing the last bits out it might be considered running a business I guess?
How? Decide you want your yard to look different. On a whim. Just decide you want a hill over there with a ring of bushes on top. Congratulations, you have created demand. Pay a local crew to have it done, money flows into the economy, everybody eats.
For greater effect, manufacture a cultural preference so that entire country clubs of people at a time decide that all hills need bonzai trees at their crest -- have all the clubbers pay all the landscaping crews.
A golf course is just a jobs program /s
When you argument is to take the extreme, you must understand that it is bullshit, right?
It’s tough when you have no counter argument, which is why you resort to arguing against the method rather than thinking of something intelligent.
Bullshit jobs don’t exist in the free market, as no capitalist would pay for someone to do something useless. If that is happening it would certainly be because a government regulator required someone to sit there twiddling thumbs.
The issue here is definition of useful/useless. If you manage to market regular rocks as magical and convince people to pay a lot of money for them, a capitalist will gladly pay for everything from digging to shipping of those rocks.
From a common sense perspective that activity is useless because it's purely wasting resources with no useful effect. From a capitalist perspective the activity is not useless as it brings profit.
And yet if you spend any time in any large corporation, you'll find countless examples of these, including in the tech industry. Don't you have any friend working for Google/Meta/${big tech co}?
Bullshit jobs can and definitely exist with capitalism: any successful and large business is filled with them.
With that said, there are lots of reasons why a company might want to vet candidate attitude besides discriminating based on protected characteristics.
Out of curiosity, what kind of questions did you find invasive or discriminatory?
I get that it's totally an innocent intent, but there are much better ways to assess a candidate's soft skills, that is strictly related to their professional experience.
Many if not most people find us a desirable attribute in coworkers and workplaces. I get that it's not for everyone, but not every workplace is a good fit for everyone.
I think you're getting some rude comments because of exactly this fact
https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1212837791031279616?la...
I think this is something all companies struggle with: at some point you may achieve product/market maturity but the people that could determine this are fundamentally in conflict with ever communicating this because they or their peers would be out of work at that employer. In my opinion, this is when internal politics start to become more prevalent because its human nature to protect your well being/source of money.
fwiw, when I interview candidates in a technical interview, I still attempt at some small talk to get a sense of "can I have a normal conversation with this person"
(appreciate the sensible responses btw!)
I don't think we should be interested in the "asymptotic theoretical limit" of capitalism which is never reached. Let's discuss "capitalism in practice", not "capitalism in theory". If things self-correct in a time frame longer than your own lifespan, do you think it's an ideal scenario? I personally don't.
I don't see the government forcing Google to pay thousands of highly qualified workers to fill in BS jobs. This is a natural consequence of being a very successful business: complacency, empire building, etc all decorellated from economic incentives.
People spend decades with BS jobs in a very capitalist society.
Note that I've never argued that a socialist alternative is any better or that the government isn't filled with BS jobs either.
I just observe that the problem manifests itself regardless.
If there is not a better option, then yes.
I was pointing out that’s not the case.
I believe the suggestion is that they certainly should be based in some moral system. Corporations are a convenient fiction we use to shield the actual humans from the effects of the actions they collectively take.
When metal working developed, all of the hundreds of thousands of years of skill in making stone tools was meaningless - it had been superseded by new technology.
I don't care one iota about craftsmen who can no longer conduct their craft in the way they want because a better technology came around. If one person can make 1000 shoes a day while a cobbler can only make 5, this is great for society.
This is why we live in skyscrapers rather than huts. This is why I don't pay people to cut my grass with scissors.
Relevant Mitchell & Webb Look sketch: https://youtu.be/nyu4u3VZYaQ
Also that's all well and good, but people won't necessarily take their skills being obsoleted lightly, just shrug their shoulders and disappear into the sunset. It could get to the point (especially if predictions about A.I. replacing a large swatch of jobs turns out to be true) that the people will get violent if unemployment gets too high. Just look at riots in Greece (when youth unemployment was 50%)[1] or France[2] for just a couple of examples.
Granted, that's not going to happen with this particular layoff, especially with the unemployment rate at a low 3.5%, but if it gets back into the double digits, it starts becoming more likely.
This is probably the real reason we gave out stimulus and PPP loans at the beginning of the Covid pandemic - to stop people from being so jobless, broke, that they take it out on the government. Not out of empathy.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/11/26/protests-in-greece-expected-...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/business/france-economy-m...
Someone will make 1000 shoes, all the same, poor quality, nowhere near the fit but they are 1000 shoes while it use to be 5.
Someone will make 1000 inferior loafs of bread. Someone will make 1000 mcdonalds quality hamburgers. Someone will build many crappy houses and stack them until they touch the sky. A box will play audio recordings to thousands while we use to sing and play instruments ourselves. A box will show pictures in stead of us reading books and giving speeches. Someone will also [kinda] have 1000 babies in stead of 5.
But we price everything at a point where profit is maxed for what people can afford and we buy 1000 things in stead of just the 5 we needed. If there is any room in the budget we will make housing more expensive.
A coworker of mine always has pain in uhhh all parts of his body, everything is sore and worn out.
One a year he goes back to his country of birth, by plane, by train, then by bus, then by taxi then he climbs the mountain. There is the tiny village where he was born. He drinks the spring water, sits in the sun under unpolluted air, eats real vegetables grown on real soil, eats meat from animals who had a good life, eggs from chickens roaming around, milk from happy cows, he takes in the view, talks with relatives. And then, gradually the pains go one by one, the headache clears up, the joins soften, the muscles work again, his head moves back above his shoulders, his eyes work again, he can walk tirelessly.
I'm not trying to make a point, it is just something to think about.
You'll care when they actively subvert the rollout of the new technology. If the technology truly benefits society more than it hurts the craftsman then you can share some of the gains with them so they too can benefit.
the alternative to this is gerontocracy and stagnation. We actually have a real world example of this, Japan. Seniority as a leading principle and the inability to fire in the name of social stability sounds great on a 10 year time horizon and appears empathetic, on a 50 year time horizon you are going to be poor compared to an economy that accepts (but ideally cushions) the fallout that comes with economic churn. In 1990 Japan's economy was 50% as large as the American economy. Today it's 19%.
Even if the luddite motivations are more reasonable than the popular image suggests, we are much better off not being stuck in an artisanal mode of production.
We really should aim for both. That the society as a whole is better off when it receives the benefits of creative destruction, it also has a moral obligation to make sure the "destruction" part is only shifting labor and expertise allocation - destroying ephemeral constructs like companies and brands, not actual lives.
It is a moral issue first and foremost, but we can't be burying our heads in the sand here and pretending we didn't know - the issue carries with it a real threat of those whose lives get destroyed rising up to tear down the civilization that crushed it. It's in everyone's self-interest to be on the side of the Luddites.
Kudos!!
