Ask HN: 1M layoffs soon, should gov intervene?
The cumulative number of layoffs in past two months alone is going to hit 1 million employees. Shouldn't the government intervene to prevent social crisis?
The unemployment rate is at record lows. Layoffs are part of the natural economic cycle.
Where are you getting 1 million numbers from? There have been maybe 100k total layoffs from top companies being publicized. Even that is a fraction of the total numbers of engineers in the industry, if we spread out the definition alot and go LALALA with our fingers in our ears.
Not dismissing 100k. That's a significant number and I hope everyone will be ok in the end.
The overall economy has record low unemployment. Tech layoffs are nowhere near 1M. Any direct intervention is likely to produce bad side effects that could be actually worse for everyone. Also, layoffs can be good for the overall economy than avoiding it, after the labor allocation is suboptimal.
https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2022/the-decline-in-employment...
I fully expect these layoffs will provide necessary labor for the next generation of startups and smaller firms that will drive the future growth, just like dotcom crash did and the financial crisis did.
I’m not US based.
I don’t know about the social crisis, but if I were the US antitrust I’d take a look at whether a tech sector cartel exists to depress wages.
Powell is on record saying unemployment rate is too low for inflation to come down so no don't expect gov intervention.
The whole point of increasing interest rates is to force high unemployment and stop workers from negotiating better wages. Why would government suddenly intervene in its own policy?
I'd be very interested in a breakdown of the skills that are being laid off from 'tech', not only in terms of 'marketing', 'recruitment', 'management', 'engineering', 'massage', etc, but also for engineers, what skills eg 'junior', 'senior' 'frontend', 'backend', 'java', 'C++', etc.
The gov is driving the layoffs with interest hikes. They WANT the layoffs.
Sensationalist headline.
proof please.
According to layoffs.fyi, 2022+ytd 2023 is <260k. That’s 20k a month tops, 2 orders of magnitude off.
According to bls, here are the unemployment numbers by month. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm
1 - "cumulative number of layoffs in past two months alone is going to hit 1 million employees" The state itself created this situation with the inflation since the end of Bretton Woods (specially the inflation during 2020-2021). If you give booze to an alcoholic he will get drunk and afterwards he will have a hangover.
2 - "Shouldn't the government intervene to prevent social crisis?" - Despite warning from people like Hayke and Mises, people tried to do all sorts of state-controlled economies (Germany, USSR, modern USA, etc). It didn't work. Better to drink lots of water, take a rest, and not get drunk next time.
These figures look pretty good to me:
Should the government have intervened when they were hiring too many people? Should the government intervene to have them more effectively use their personnel?
No.
The US economy added 500k jobs last quarter, so there isn’t really a social crisis
In the US, we have the unemployment insurance system that’s run by the government already. Isn’t this a government intervention that’s already there? What else should they be doing?
Doubt it is necessary.
But maybe the govt can hire these people to improve a bunch of the aging software we have.
Pay them a decent salary + pension.
Government: if you think the problems we create are bad, wait until you see our solutions.
Depends on the hiring figures. Maybe they are mostly finding jobs elsewhere.