It's almost like just relying on the invisible hand of the market to create good results doesn't work.
And to be clear: just because you're incentivized to harm people, doesn't exonerate you when you harm people. "I was just following incentives" isn't a defense.
Depends on what you are optimizing for. Seems like tech employees are doing just fine. Enormous compensation, great severance, and entering a low unemployment market.
How many tears do you shed when someone with a vast amount of wealth has to take a few months to find a new job?
Yes, I'm aware that people's well-being is hard to measure. That doesn't make it not worth optimizing for.
> Seems like tech employees are doing just fine. Enormous compensation, great severance, and entering a low unemployment market.
1. Contractors are losing jobs too through lack of renewal of contracts, it's just not being reported because on paper it's an absence of an event, not an event.
2. Even among full time workers, tech workers aren't the only ones getting laid off.
3. The big companies are the ones being reported, but smaller companies are following suit, and don't have as nice of severance packages.
4. It is not in evidence that we are in a low unemployment market. Those who were just laid off aren't reflected in unemployment statistics yet. In many cases you can't file for unemployment if you received severance, so many will never be reflected in unemployment statistics. And there are a bunch of ways in which unemployment and underemployment simply aren't represented by the statistics, ever.
5. If the severances were as good as you're saying, it would be cheaper for the companies to keep the workers on. Representing this as anything other than companies using workers to subsidize their lost revenues is absurd.
> How many tears do you shed when someone with a vast amount of wealth has to take a few months to find a new job?
I'm not sad when execs get fired, that's what I'm proposing. But it appears you've done some mental gymnastics to convince yourself that the workers are the ones with vast amounts of wealth.
The latest numbers I have are going into January 2023 which were 1.8% for tech.[1]. Per your link, there were 120k people laid off in 2023, and 240k laid off in 2022, so the 240k would already be baked into the numbers. Your link also shows that there are still many more openings than the layoffs, althought the difference is getting closer
The number of "tech workers" depends on the definition used, but this grouping of BLS roles gives ~5 million workers from the US.[2]
If every tech workers laid off in 2023 stays unemployed all year, that would only bump the Tech unemployment from ~1.8% to maybe 3.8%. But we know that isn't the case because there are tons of open positions.
This is all very worst case estimates because many of the people laid off don't fall into the job roles I mentioned, they just work for a tech company
And to be clear: just because you're incentivized to harm people, doesn't exonerate you when you harm people. "I was just following incentives" isn't a defense.