I may be missing something, but if Kroger laid off 7% of its workforce that would be 465,000 * 7% = 32,550 people and not the 170 that work at a single store. To get to 7% of their 2,720 stores closed you’d have to close 190 stores, or about the same ~32K people. Contrary to your point, I think Kroger closing 190 stores actually would be national news.
But, as I said, maybe I missed something that would make these numbers make sense.
Okay, so it's comparing the absolute numbers. Thanks for the clarification. The way it was written confused me before. I guess I was tired when I wrote the earlier comment because I don't find it confusing after re-reading it! Heh.
"There are people who staff the offices — security guards and receptionists and people operating cafeterias. Big companies are just big, and they employ generic kinds of labor ...."
The security guards, cafeteria workers, and other such workers generally work for contractors -- not for Alphabet, Apple, Meta, etc.
Sitting here front and center, and TBH, there are two things happening, swiftly, and somewhat all at once:
Lots of engineering-adjacent jobs are getting the axe:
- The "program managers", aka project managers by a fancier name are being booted if all they do is "nagging as a service" (asking for a lot of status updates but not really adding value)
- The HR bloat. Most HR is pretty useless in white collar jobs. It doesn't prevent bad things like sexual harassment. And most of the other functions they do can easily be outsourced.
- Product managers who don't do their job and work as glorified order takers. Good product managers are worth their weight in platinum, but they are also rare. Lots of people that couldn't really do the tech but came from other wall street jobs ended up being "product managers".
- The ivory tower tech architect who throws down mandates from the ivory tower but doesn't actually do anything are finding themselves on the market and having to learn to actually produce value again
- Many "engineers" who came into the industry because of the money, but who can't actually engineer anything, are being culled.
Of course, many of the layoffs are hitting the wrong people too, but in general, the shift is towards getting back to actually building stuff and not being a jobs program for people skilled at little other than brown-nosing and butt kissing.
Wages coming back to earth is welcome as well - most mid level engineers were not worth 500K a year, even if the stars right now can easily produce over 1M a year in value.
The good news is we already have the seeds of the next bubble with AI. My company is already doing AI powered HR software - we even use GPT-3 to do reorgs now. I know another one that goes generative AI for mechanical designs that save power in large power plants. Another is doing machine learning to understand with reasonable precision from someone's voice whether they have depression or not (going through phase 3 approval right now).
Whatever Web3 was - the basis for the excess in the last bubble, nobody can tell you what it does. Anyone who has listen to anything in tech over the last 3 months, on the other hand, knows exactly what GPT-3, Chat GPT, Dall-E, and other similar tech does.
Worry not, we're at the start of the next tech bubble, before the air is inflated out of the last one. Meta has 100 openings for Machine Learning engineers right now.
My understanding is that it is very difficult to switch careers and go into public school teaching which is part of the reason there is still such high demand for school teachers.
it seems like it should be pretty easy for someone who say, graduated with a law degree but decided they didn't want to be a lawyer to transition to teaching middle school civics.
And yet, in 12-18 months the war for talent will be back. Companies always think they can do "more with less" until they find out that really, they can for a short time do "the same with less" as surviving employees work longer hours to keep their jobs in a down market. This soon becomes doing "less with less" when those same employees get burned out or jump ship for better comp and better job security.
Interestingly, my management from the VP level down has been very fervently on the "do less with less" bandwagon since mid-last year, explicitly stating that "more with less" is (and I quote) "managerial bullshit".
I think this article kind of undersells the importance of the big tech companies, these were the biggest companies in the US by market cap at the peak of the market in 2021 (some of them still are). But their prospects for growth (both in their own eyes seeing as they are doing layoffs, and the market since now they are priced as solidly instead of spectuarlalry growing companies) have dimmed considerably.
This means a pretty big chunk of the value of America's companies was wound up in the idea that Facebook/Google, etc. would keep growing really fast. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Of course we are not looking at some extended period of extended unemployment because of this. But I do think it's important that basically the one industry expected to have a lot of growth over the next 10 years is going to probably see much less growth.
One of the main things Big Tech offers employees, besides compensation, is a great deal of autonomy over the work. Not just in terms of HR stuff like remote work or flexible hours, but in terms of understanding the business context personally, shaping decisions about what to build, and taking initiative. Enterprise IT treats software development as more of an assembly line where you’re given precisely defined tasks and expected to maintain a tempo & not screw around. Partly this has to do with the perceived role of software in the business (software IS the business vs. software is an overhead like offices and toner). Some enterprises have expressed ambition to be more like tech companies on this one. But partly it’s because when you’re working on low value stuff, you have to be really careful not to spend more time on something than it’s worth. I don’t think traditional enterprise will be able to get much additional value out of FAANG-tier talent as long as it manages them in such cost-conscious ways, and it seems like the economics of the situation require it to.
One pedantic point: tech companies generally do not employ janitors or cafeteria workers, so-called “non core” roles are almost always outside contractors. So when tech companies do layoffs it really is concentrated among high earners as tech companies typically don’t employ anything else. I don’t know how widespread this is outside of tech but anecdotally I’ve heard that very few major corporations continue to staff their own “non core” roles.
But presumably they downsize their contracts when they cut their employee staff? Or is this sort of staff tied to their real estate consumption, and their real estate consumption moves independently of their engineering staff?
Downsizing of cleaning, food service, etc. has already largely occurred due to the remote work trend. Real estate consumption moves slowly, if at all, due to long-term leases, a saturated sublet market, and it being a PITA to consolidate, for instance, five floor plates down to three.
In my experience -- these contracts have already been cut down to absolute bone over the past 15 years. It's ~ a fixed cost now if there's a lease or real estate asset.
I am actively hiring software engineers and other related positions. There has been absolutely zero downward pressure on salaries despite the recent layoffs at the tech giants. The big picture remains incredibly robust for people with these job skills.
Insightful as usual. Thank you! Business cycles are quite important for corporate health because of these dynamics. The churn of the market tends to set fire to inefficient corporate bureaucracies and shitty businesses that probably need to be put to rest. A lil disruption is good. And in this particular instance, theres a lot of slack in our labor markets to eat up these workers.
As always, nits need picking tho, lol! Not a particularly important point, but….
“The very large, historically low-wage, and not-that-desirable food service and retail sectors are eager to hire more people. Eager enough that they’ve been raising wages rapidly enough to start shrinking income inequality — but not so rapidly as to change the fact that these are fairly low-wage, undesirable jobs that people move out of if they can.“
Can’t speak so much for retail labor, but in food service, this is not exactly my experience. I think, rather, many are drawn to food service, both cooking and serving, as these are naturally pleasing to many personalities. Being part of a great hosting team is truly satisfying to many myself included, especially when done authentically, and so easy to see the results of your work on the faces of your customers. Not for everyone for sure tho, seems to be lots of us middle children (with both older and younger siblings), more females, more gentle, less aggressive people I’ve found. Not much room for egos, lol.
But low incomes make it very difficult to make these work practically speaking, especially to support a family. That is, unless you run your own place, also difficult, highly competitive, and labor intensive (and capital intensive.) But owning one’s own restaurant is an attainable (American) dream for SO MANY.
All that is to say, food service work is generally low wage, and often also physically demanding, but also satisfying and wholesome. Many are trying to find ways to stay in the industry, just unable to justify the low wages especially after covid made the job more dangerous. And that is moving the food service labor market and food inflation substantially.
If you’re making 6 figure in a tech job, a $45k line cook job ain’t going to seem great for sure. These are labor markets without a ton of overlap. But there are certainly tons of tech jobs in sectors all over.
This is a great point, and a perspective I had not heard, thank you for sharing.
One thing I know firsthand is that there are a lot of people working in tech with a very mercenary attitude. It’s not the job they want, but they can do it, and they just can’t say no to the money. A lot of people intend to work in Tech for X years, accumulate a very substantial savings account, and then get out of tech and use that savings to work on some thing they care more about. I don’t know very many people who have opened restaurants specifically, but I’ve heard of all kinds of small arts and crafts oriented businesses, brew pubs, and roasteries and such.
My guess is we’ll see an increase in such “Main Street” business formation in the next few years as many tech workers treat these layoffs and severance packages as their signal it’s time to take the money and do the thing they actually care about.
Thats a great point. That same poison is in the food service industry and elsewhere. Its corporate culture bullshit.
People don’t generally appreciate serving angry customers or in a forced, fake manner. The whole corporate rat race and cost cutting mixed with legal cya without any trust for individual employees to act with agency - it defeats the reward for those of us who would like to please people. It makes people into cogs.
With the news of these layoffs, I keep thinking about the convo I had here in these comments a few months ago with someone (apologies, I can’t remember who) who insisted it was totally normal and fine for his buddies to make 6 figures in tech for 2 hours of work a week. It just doesn’t pencil out.
Twitter took out 2/3 of its employees - not all tech / dev. but still - and this degree of waste is the only explanation that makes sense on how that's even possible. I've been involved in broad cost cutting initiatives ~ my entire career. The biggest targets I've ever seen are 20%. This is crazy.
> I get it, but this logic is very odd to me. I work for an old-school industrial company that’s quite sclerotic but always trying to get with the times. But the idea that more headcount=growth=good is strange and backwards to me. If business is good, and we have more work to do, we have to hire more people- usually reluctantly. But the demand comes first- specific projects that don’t have enough people to accomplish them. Though when we work on govt-funded projects, things can get upside down and we staff up to match a budget then scope the work from there. Is the problem that these tech companies are over-valuated, and have more money than they know what to productively do with?
>> I’m not exactly sure why this happened, but roughly a year ago there was a substantial vibe shift in Silicon Valley which holds that most large technology companies are massively overstaffed.
> Many, if not most, tech companies are extremely reluctant to fire engineers for performance reasons until they run into a cash flow issue and have to do layoffs. You’ll find this general consensus across tech forums (e.g., Hackers News). I believe this is the case for a multitude of reasons.
Some of this is just "big company" culture - people have performance issues, and the question their manager asks is not "is this person producing below the median for their role" but rather "does this person provide positive value at all balanced against the risk/cost of rolling the dice on a new hire".
Add to that the inherent ambiguity in even measuring engineer performance (lines of code? design docs? launched features? bugs fixed? hours spent mentoring junior engineers? project management?) plus a skill set that is in high demand in the market, and you have a recipe for making it challenging to identify and manage low performers.
This is why tech firms focus so much on "rewarding high performers" - because in general it's way easier to identify high performers than low ones.
Also ... MSFT in the 2000s was a spectacular failure. To the extent Travis Cole's comment is representative of the Ballmer-era culture ... then yeah, no surprise they struggled as much as they did.
Not the main point, but why are Netflix and SalesForce tech companies? I used to find it interesting that Dell was a tech company but Ford Motor was not, even though both mainly assembled something from parts they bought. Ford recently had a patent issue called "Methods of non-destructive residual stress measurement using barkhausen noise and use of such methods." I have no clue what "barkhausen noise" is, but it sounds like advanced mechanical engineering.
I can't find it in their revenue statement , but I imagine a good chunk of Dell revenue is supporting their hardware for corporate clients and helping them implement and roll out appropriate solutions for their needs. I don't think they are just a distribution center shipping assembled computers that they receive from China manufacturing.
I assume “tech” is used to mean predominantly electrical engineering and computer science. Mechanical engineering (which is my field) is not considered “tech” in the 21st century sense... even though it’s certainly technical, and we still do advanced stuff 😄
When I was in high school, I told my dad (a naval architect) that I thought maybe I’d like to be a civil engineer. He told me in no uncertain terms that civil engineers were lame, and that I should do mechanical engineering, because if you can make something that moves, you can make something that doesn’t move. I’d say the advice held up.
I dunno, Matt might want to watch his self-interest here. As a Big Tech software engineer who was laid off recently, I'm going to be reconsidering my paid subscription to Slow Boring.
I think from an impartial point of view he recognizes that if Big Substack has a few percentage point correction, that could be a good thing. Especially if a few of those people start reading local news.
" But there are basically three ways America’s episode of above-target inflation could conceivably end. One would be a loss of central bank credibility and upward spiraling of price increases. The second would be tightening the monetary noose enough to generate a real recession. And the third would be something like “large-scale layoffs in a few economic sectors that allow the other sectors to expand without big wage increases.”
Let's HOPE the Fed sees it that way and not the way some newspaper pundits do that the Fed needs to keep tightening until it sees clear evidence of unemployment/recessions. TIPS is still signaling that bond markets think the Fed has done/will do enough to restore the inflation target w/o recession.
I may be missing something, but if Kroger laid off 7% of its workforce that would be 465,000 * 7% = 32,550 people and not the 170 that work at a single store. To get to 7% of their 2,720 stores closed you’d have to close 190 stores, or about the same ~32K people. Contrary to your point, I think Kroger closing 190 stores actually would be national news.
But, as I said, maybe I missed something that would make these numbers make sense.
No, it's 7% of Vox ~= 1 Kroger in terms of number of employees. So the media inflates the importance of Vox layoffs relative to its impact overall.
Okay, so it's comparing the absolute numbers. Thanks for the clarification. The way it was written confused me before. I guess I was tired when I wrote the earlier comment because I don't find it confusing after re-reading it! Heh.
"There are people who staff the offices — security guards and receptionists and people operating cafeterias. Big companies are just big, and they employ generic kinds of labor ...."
The security guards, cafeteria workers, and other such workers generally work for contractors -- not for Alphabet, Apple, Meta, etc.
Sitting here front and center, and TBH, there are two things happening, swiftly, and somewhat all at once:
Lots of engineering-adjacent jobs are getting the axe:
- The "program managers", aka project managers by a fancier name are being booted if all they do is "nagging as a service" (asking for a lot of status updates but not really adding value)
- The HR bloat. Most HR is pretty useless in white collar jobs. It doesn't prevent bad things like sexual harassment. And most of the other functions they do can easily be outsourced.
- Product managers who don't do their job and work as glorified order takers. Good product managers are worth their weight in platinum, but they are also rare. Lots of people that couldn't really do the tech but came from other wall street jobs ended up being "product managers".
- The ivory tower tech architect who throws down mandates from the ivory tower but doesn't actually do anything are finding themselves on the market and having to learn to actually produce value again
- Many "engineers" who came into the industry because of the money, but who can't actually engineer anything, are being culled.
Of course, many of the layoffs are hitting the wrong people too, but in general, the shift is towards getting back to actually building stuff and not being a jobs program for people skilled at little other than brown-nosing and butt kissing.
Wages coming back to earth is welcome as well - most mid level engineers were not worth 500K a year, even if the stars right now can easily produce over 1M a year in value.
The good news is we already have the seeds of the next bubble with AI. My company is already doing AI powered HR software - we even use GPT-3 to do reorgs now. I know another one that goes generative AI for mechanical designs that save power in large power plants. Another is doing machine learning to understand with reasonable precision from someone's voice whether they have depression or not (going through phase 3 approval right now).
Whatever Web3 was - the basis for the excess in the last bubble, nobody can tell you what it does. Anyone who has listen to anything in tech over the last 3 months, on the other hand, knows exactly what GPT-3, Chat GPT, Dall-E, and other similar tech does.
Worry not, we're at the start of the next tech bubble, before the air is inflated out of the last one. Meta has 100 openings for Machine Learning engineers right now.
Really interesting perspective -- and helpful. Thanks!
My understanding is that it is very difficult to switch careers and go into public school teaching which is part of the reason there is still such high demand for school teachers.
it seems like it should be pretty easy for someone who say, graduated with a law degree but decided they didn't want to be a lawyer to transition to teaching middle school civics.
And yet, in 12-18 months the war for talent will be back. Companies always think they can do "more with less" until they find out that really, they can for a short time do "the same with less" as surviving employees work longer hours to keep their jobs in a down market. This soon becomes doing "less with less" when those same employees get burned out or jump ship for better comp and better job security.
Interestingly, my management from the VP level down has been very fervently on the "do less with less" bandwagon since mid-last year, explicitly stating that "more with less" is (and I quote) "managerial bullshit".
I think this article kind of undersells the importance of the big tech companies, these were the biggest companies in the US by market cap at the peak of the market in 2021 (some of them still are). But their prospects for growth (both in their own eyes seeing as they are doing layoffs, and the market since now they are priced as solidly instead of spectuarlalry growing companies) have dimmed considerably.
Of course in terms of overall employment they are pretty small. But as of 2020 the big tech stocks were 17% of the S&P's marketcap https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/28/sp-500-dominated-by-apple-microsoft-alphabet-amazon-facebook.html
This means a pretty big chunk of the value of America's companies was wound up in the idea that Facebook/Google, etc. would keep growing really fast. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Of course we are not looking at some extended period of extended unemployment because of this. But I do think it's important that basically the one industry expected to have a lot of growth over the next 10 years is going to probably see much less growth.
One of the main things Big Tech offers employees, besides compensation, is a great deal of autonomy over the work. Not just in terms of HR stuff like remote work or flexible hours, but in terms of understanding the business context personally, shaping decisions about what to build, and taking initiative. Enterprise IT treats software development as more of an assembly line where you’re given precisely defined tasks and expected to maintain a tempo & not screw around. Partly this has to do with the perceived role of software in the business (software IS the business vs. software is an overhead like offices and toner). Some enterprises have expressed ambition to be more like tech companies on this one. But partly it’s because when you’re working on low value stuff, you have to be really careful not to spend more time on something than it’s worth. I don’t think traditional enterprise will be able to get much additional value out of FAANG-tier talent as long as it manages them in such cost-conscious ways, and it seems like the economics of the situation require it to.
One pedantic point: tech companies generally do not employ janitors or cafeteria workers, so-called “non core” roles are almost always outside contractors. So when tech companies do layoffs it really is concentrated among high earners as tech companies typically don’t employ anything else. I don’t know how widespread this is outside of tech but anecdotally I’ve heard that very few major corporations continue to staff their own “non core” roles.
But presumably they downsize their contracts when they cut their employee staff? Or is this sort of staff tied to their real estate consumption, and their real estate consumption moves independently of their engineering staff?
Downsizing of cleaning, food service, etc. has already largely occurred due to the remote work trend. Real estate consumption moves slowly, if at all, due to long-term leases, a saturated sublet market, and it being a PITA to consolidate, for instance, five floor plates down to three.
In my experience -- these contracts have already been cut down to absolute bone over the past 15 years. It's ~ a fixed cost now if there's a lease or real estate asset.
Timely New York Times article today about how software people are starting to migrate to climate-related startups (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/technology/recession-resilient-climate-start-ups-shine-in-tech-downturn.html). While this might be seen as a very hopeful sign for the future, let's not be too quick to praise it. After all, for a mere $10 billion investment, we got to see a bright new day appear when Meta was finally able to supply their metaverse avatars with legs (https://mashable.com/article/meta-avatars-legs-metaverse-mark-zuckerberg).
Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.
I am actively hiring software engineers and other related positions. There has been absolutely zero downward pressure on salaries despite the recent layoffs at the tech giants. The big picture remains incredibly robust for people with these job skills.
Insightful as usual. Thank you! Business cycles are quite important for corporate health because of these dynamics. The churn of the market tends to set fire to inefficient corporate bureaucracies and shitty businesses that probably need to be put to rest. A lil disruption is good. And in this particular instance, theres a lot of slack in our labor markets to eat up these workers.
As always, nits need picking tho, lol! Not a particularly important point, but….
“The very large, historically low-wage, and not-that-desirable food service and retail sectors are eager to hire more people. Eager enough that they’ve been raising wages rapidly enough to start shrinking income inequality — but not so rapidly as to change the fact that these are fairly low-wage, undesirable jobs that people move out of if they can.“
Can’t speak so much for retail labor, but in food service, this is not exactly my experience. I think, rather, many are drawn to food service, both cooking and serving, as these are naturally pleasing to many personalities. Being part of a great hosting team is truly satisfying to many myself included, especially when done authentically, and so easy to see the results of your work on the faces of your customers. Not for everyone for sure tho, seems to be lots of us middle children (with both older and younger siblings), more females, more gentle, less aggressive people I’ve found. Not much room for egos, lol.
But low incomes make it very difficult to make these work practically speaking, especially to support a family. That is, unless you run your own place, also difficult, highly competitive, and labor intensive (and capital intensive.) But owning one’s own restaurant is an attainable (American) dream for SO MANY.
All that is to say, food service work is generally low wage, and often also physically demanding, but also satisfying and wholesome. Many are trying to find ways to stay in the industry, just unable to justify the low wages especially after covid made the job more dangerous. And that is moving the food service labor market and food inflation substantially.
If you’re making 6 figure in a tech job, a $45k line cook job ain’t going to seem great for sure. These are labor markets without a ton of overlap. But there are certainly tons of tech jobs in sectors all over.
This is a great point, and a perspective I had not heard, thank you for sharing.
One thing I know firsthand is that there are a lot of people working in tech with a very mercenary attitude. It’s not the job they want, but they can do it, and they just can’t say no to the money. A lot of people intend to work in Tech for X years, accumulate a very substantial savings account, and then get out of tech and use that savings to work on some thing they care more about. I don’t know very many people who have opened restaurants specifically, but I’ve heard of all kinds of small arts and crafts oriented businesses, brew pubs, and roasteries and such.
My guess is we’ll see an increase in such “Main Street” business formation in the next few years as many tech workers treat these layoffs and severance packages as their signal it’s time to take the money and do the thing they actually care about.
Great point on Main st biz formation. I agree. And we desperately need that sort of thing to be honest.
There was a really great BigThink piece on collective illusions surrounding employment choices. Worth checking out:
https://bigthink.com/series/collective-illusions/what-workers-want/
Thats a great point. That same poison is in the food service industry and elsewhere. Its corporate culture bullshit.
People don’t generally appreciate serving angry customers or in a forced, fake manner. The whole corporate rat race and cost cutting mixed with legal cya without any trust for individual employees to act with agency - it defeats the reward for those of us who would like to please people. It makes people into cogs.
With the news of these layoffs, I keep thinking about the convo I had here in these comments a few months ago with someone (apologies, I can’t remember who) who insisted it was totally normal and fine for his buddies to make 6 figures in tech for 2 hours of work a week. It just doesn’t pencil out.
Twitter took out 2/3 of its employees - not all tech / dev. but still - and this degree of waste is the only explanation that makes sense on how that's even possible. I've been involved in broad cost cutting initiatives ~ my entire career. The biggest targets I've ever seen are 20%. This is crazy.
Is this the thread you’re thinking about? https://www.slowboring.com/p/elon-musk-needs-to-make-twitter-better/comment/10141589
> I get it, but this logic is very odd to me. I work for an old-school industrial company that’s quite sclerotic but always trying to get with the times. But the idea that more headcount=growth=good is strange and backwards to me. If business is good, and we have more work to do, we have to hire more people- usually reluctantly. But the demand comes first- specific projects that don’t have enough people to accomplish them. Though when we work on govt-funded projects, things can get upside down and we staff up to match a budget then scope the work from there. Is the problem that these tech companies are over-valuated, and have more money than they know what to productively do with?
Is a reply to a long comment from myself starting with, https://www.slowboring.com/p/elon-musk-needs-to-make-twitter-better/comment/10138366
>> I’m not exactly sure why this happened, but roughly a year ago there was a substantial vibe shift in Silicon Valley which holds that most large technology companies are massively overstaffed.
> Many, if not most, tech companies are extremely reluctant to fire engineers for performance reasons until they run into a cash flow issue and have to do layoffs. You’ll find this general consensus across tech forums (e.g., Hackers News). I believe this is the case for a multitude of reasons.
> …
Some of this is just "big company" culture - people have performance issues, and the question their manager asks is not "is this person producing below the median for their role" but rather "does this person provide positive value at all balanced against the risk/cost of rolling the dice on a new hire".
Add to that the inherent ambiguity in even measuring engineer performance (lines of code? design docs? launched features? bugs fixed? hours spent mentoring junior engineers? project management?) plus a skill set that is in high demand in the market, and you have a recipe for making it challenging to identify and manage low performers.
This is why tech firms focus so much on "rewarding high performers" - because in general it's way easier to identify high performers than low ones.
Yes, that day/sentiment, though it was this comment in particular that has stuck with me: https://www.slowboring.com/p/elon-musk-needs-to-make-twitter-better/comment/10144911
And the replies from Morpho suggesting I was engaging in "cheap moralizing" for being surprised that companies were being run this way.
Also ... MSFT in the 2000s was a spectacular failure. To the extent Travis Cole's comment is representative of the Ballmer-era culture ... then yeah, no surprise they struggled as much as they did.
https://www.statista.com/chart/1399/microsoft-stock-under-steve-ballmer/
Not the main point, but why are Netflix and SalesForce tech companies? I used to find it interesting that Dell was a tech company but Ford Motor was not, even though both mainly assembled something from parts they bought. Ford recently had a patent issue called "Methods of non-destructive residual stress measurement using barkhausen noise and use of such methods." I have no clue what "barkhausen noise" is, but it sounds like advanced mechanical engineering.
I can't find it in their revenue statement , but I imagine a good chunk of Dell revenue is supporting their hardware for corporate clients and helping them implement and roll out appropriate solutions for their needs. I don't think they are just a distribution center shipping assembled computers that they receive from China manufacturing.
I assume “tech” is used to mean predominantly electrical engineering and computer science. Mechanical engineering (which is my field) is not considered “tech” in the 21st century sense... even though it’s certainly technical, and we still do advanced stuff 😄
Woe to the poor unappreciated mechanical engineers...
It is why I switched to software systems.
Also civil engineers, but no one likes civil engineers.
When I was in high school, I told my dad (a naval architect) that I thought maybe I’d like to be a civil engineer. He told me in no uncertain terms that civil engineers were lame, and that I should do mechanical engineering, because if you can make something that moves, you can make something that doesn’t move. I’d say the advice held up.
As I was told in my intro-to-engineering class when they were trying to describe what each discipline did: "CivE make targets. MechEs blow them up."
I dunno, Matt might want to watch his self-interest here. As a Big Tech software engineer who was laid off recently, I'm going to be reconsidering my paid subscription to Slow Boring.
I think from an impartial point of view he recognizes that if Big Substack has a few percentage point correction, that could be a good thing. Especially if a few of those people start reading local news.
" But there are basically three ways America’s episode of above-target inflation could conceivably end. One would be a loss of central bank credibility and upward spiraling of price increases. The second would be tightening the monetary noose enough to generate a real recession. And the third would be something like “large-scale layoffs in a few economic sectors that allow the other sectors to expand without big wage increases.”
Let's HOPE the Fed sees it that way and not the way some newspaper pundits do that the Fed needs to keep tightening until it sees clear evidence of unemployment/recessions. TIPS is still signaling that bond markets think the Fed has done/will do enough to restore the inflation target w/o recession.