Okay, but why would these companies secretly know something that the rest of us doesn‘t? Maybe they are preparing, but it doesn’t tell us more about whether that‘s justified or not.
Tech companies have seen compensation skyrocket with no end in sight. Everybody laying off a bunch of people at the same time to flood the market means they all need to compete far less for people. Suddenly "hey I've got another offer, can you beat it?" becomes less feasible.
This is an industry-wide emergent strategy to limit compensation.
Notice how these companies are still hiring after the layoffs.
I’m sure. All of these companies use the same criteria and went on a hiring binge, partially to deny employees to competitors. It’s a like a gas station pump war.
End of the day, when growth slows, it’s hard to justify some of these salaries, becuase you can’t raise prices forever. I lost an employee who is getting paid $450k by AWS to do customer engineer type work. It’s just not worth that to me, and we hired a replacement recent graduate who went to a school that FANG companies will bin him for. The replacement makes $125k, is great, and will probably be with us for 3-4 years.
They were printing money and dealing with chaos. A friend of mine in sales booked multiple deals with a phone call (ie. Give me X widgets by Y date) for >$10M in April-June 2020. Exceeded his yearly goal before end of April.
The Federal government prevented a depression by shooting a firehose of money at everything. NYC public schools alone bought almost a million iPads.
Agreed, I don’t think it is productive to have conspiratorial mindset where there is a group of insiders who have access to a key piece of information and then engage in Kremlinology to decipher their macroeconomic views.
To be sure, Google will have some interesting and proprietary data, but the signal to noise ratio will still be tiny.
