HACKER Q&A
📣 Yoric

(When) will tech sector hiring recover?


I imagine that I'm not the only one doomscrolling through layoffs and wondering who's next.

Any data point that would suggest a possible recovery? Or could this snowball indefinitely? And if it does recover, when would that happen?

  👤 mamonster Accepted Answer ✓
Not until it makes financial sense to do so.

Risk free rate is what, 4.75%? So you WACC is probably somewhere in the 9s-10s for the best companies, and likely 15s-17s for middle ones. You cut staff + cut payrolls and your free cash flow growth comes basically almost immediately, whereas actual revenue growth would have so much of the valuation come from the future.

Basically, if you have rates above 4%, most growth narratives/projections simply don't make sense.

👤 lordkrandel
There's a global re-alignment from turboinvestments and VC based hiring in the Silicon Valley to real world needed workforce and I bet, salary ranges. We can't afford to burn cash in this moment of history. So all companies that relied on infinite growth needs a re-alignment. So until every SV company has cut someone, it won't be done. But the best number of jobs cut for a company is one, so if you see more, it's either company failure or system failure like in the DOTCOM bust. Once that investors feel their money's not wasted for growth in times of recession, all will be more competitive and more about real problems. It's actually good for the industry, bad for the hires.
👤 gregjor
No one knows. It goes in cycles and varies by industry and location. Some companies hiring right now, others laying off.

If I cared about job security I’d look at companies that make a profit and don’t exist solely to exploit investors, staff, and customers to satisfy shareholders and executives.

Any tech company that had big layoffs but left the C-suite intact deserves to shrivel up.

👤 throwaway019254
I’m working for a smaller publicly traded company that had layoffs at the end of the last year. It’s beginning of February and we are hiring at full-speed again.

Maybe it’s already recovering?

👤 abudabi123
Investors need to drop the axe on the rabbit breeding car share, hybrid ebicycle program proliferated to reserve for themselves public street parking and a trip hazard on walking paths. They need to prove their utility function or get layoffs. They show a waste of capital which could be better spent on Ai, Lisp, Arc Lang, and the kind of dull imagination you'd expect from an ivy leaguer USA MBA born in Communist Party State.