This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The answer is that in this context "Economy" means the stock price of billionaires' vested companies, not the prosperity of a common citizen (a.k.a peasant)
Using out of touch metrics that say nothing about how the median household is doing is not helpful.
On the other hand if you measure by how much the shareholders are getting richer, the layoffs are exactly why the economy is considered booming. Record layoffs lead to record short term profits for the wealthy few.
Combined with billions in weapons being ordered and produced, oil producing competition being crushed, while gimping Europs growth. The Chinese hurting from the Evergrande debacle and the lithography embargo.
Plenty of reasons for the US as an entity to celebrate.
Layoffs hurt GDP generally, but GDP doesn't really care as long as "value" is created elsewhere. Like you said, none of the measurements they use care about the median income. It's usually just generic measurements of "value" that don't mean anything for the people of a nation.
It’s pretty clear to me that many companies are jumping on the layoff bandwagon right now since so many others are doing it too (doesn’t look as bad if your layoffs are drowned out in the noise). Easy way to increase profitability (on paper) and not look quite as bad if “everyone else is doing it.”
The US Economy is only booming for rich people.
The past 40 years have shown me that no matter how well the economy is doing in the news, it doesnt mean shit for most Americans.
"The stock market is booming". Fixed the first part of the title for you.
As for why all of the layoffs? Because in the short term it usually causes the quoted bit above.
It's a bunch of stuff.
The big companies all seriously upped their hiring game when COVID sent everybody work from home and all of a sudden a nice, cheap, workforce opened up all over the place. It's not that they're overstaffed at this point, but now that they can say look they're doing it over there too! The market's rough! A lot of big places have decided it's a good time to shed souls. They now have the opportunity to cut the more expensive people and the underperforming people, at the same time they get to increase their margins and improve their stock performance.
Interest rates are up so money's not free anymore (for the time being), advertising on the internet's getting harder due to legislation and public sentiment. SEO is getting harder. Everyone's dumping every available dollar they have into AI hoping to win big at buzzword bingo. Wages are starting to catch up to inflation they're paying more for what people they have. And honestly it's just an easy time for them to grab an extra couple of bucks.
A great number of the big guys probably are about to take a bath in corporate real estate.
There's also a another possible recession sitting around the corner. I believe there's already talk of the feds cutting rates again for a bit to try to side step it.
Honestly most of the stuff isn't really that new. But when Microsoft decides to do it, Google says hey that's a good idea let's do it! Everybody else is going to jump on board. Three - six months from now (assuming we're not mid recession) they'll probably be taking out billboards and reengaging bring a friend incentives again.
Tech needs to unionize. The only way to fight this is just to have the entire workforce walk out.
I've said this for years but my colleagues are all hooked on chasing payrises for themselves and won't work collectively because they think it'll hurt them doing that.
And honestly it’s just an easy time for them to grab an extra couple of bucks.
This is what it is. You didn't have to say more than this. The soulless husks that we know as directors want more money for themselves.
Because they’re greedy cunts and they want more profit.
because capitalism is not about the workers, not about the quality of the product, and not about helping anyone. It doesn't give a shit about anyone except whichever monkey is on top, and would argue vehemently against the suggestion that it should.
I'd go so far as to say that what it IS about, is not being human. Perhaps it's about becoming a dragon? but even that implies some degree of personality. Capitalism is unrelenting, banal evil, for the sake of being evil, with an endless litany of specious lies to justify its utterly retarded bullshit.
I've always said capitalism and corporations are anti-social. They make society worse for profit.
Booming for the rich?
Laying people off is a way to juice the stock price in the short term. So perhaps the "economy is booming" because of the layoffs?
The same reason everything costs more without there being inflation, greed and the never ending desire to make the line go up. At the end of the day that’s all a publicly traded company cares about. Line go up. They will do whatever they can legally, or hidden from legal scrutiny to make that happen.
I asked an executive this very question, and he said that the board was getting pressure from stock-holders to reduce headcounts, and justifying that pressure by pointing to other large companies who had already undertaken massive layoffs, and the resulting rise in their stock prices. In this way layoffs become a game of follow the leader -- or like a contagion. "Google just fired a third of their workforce, why are we doing that? We should do what they did, look how successful they are."
Executive decision-making is like ChatGPT, but even dumber.
Ugh well hopefully there will come a point when there's not actually enough people to layoff anymore. Then maybe the game of follow the leader will stop. Or maybe another one starts up where they start over hiring again, who knows
Money isn't free anymore and they have a lot of debt
And
Elon broke the seal on firing huge swaths of a tech workforce to make your numbers look better.
Elon broke the seal on firing huge swaths of a tech workforce to make your numbers look better.
Don't give him too much credit, it's hardly the first time the tech sector has gone through this cycle. Elon had to do it because he massively overpaid for Twitter. The fact that his layoffs came at the front of this wave is probably just coincidence.
Because they hired too many
The layoffs are precisely why the “economy” is “booming”.
Nah, reducing costs in one relatively small sector doesn't affect the GDP or other national-level metrics.
Tech is a cost center (in most cases) not a revenue center so despite us being an invaluable resource, IT jobs are generally the first cut when investors need to be paid
...Searches for the word "union" in the article...
Yeah it's propaganda.
