I was laid off three weeks ago and since then I have been looking for new opportunities actively. I went through a lot during the past few weeks, but I’m getting a bit more happier every day. I tried to put things in perspective, and still want to understand a bit why this happened and how it could go in the future.
Knock down your own house
This is all happened because companies wasn’t extremely happy about what’s happening now. For instance, high interest rate; more workers’ benefits; more competition without a potential gain. Especially they always believe Feds is supposed to be on their side. Maybe that still is true in the end. But at least for now they have to cry like a baby to protest to the world.
You want cooler economy, let me give you the layoffs you are asking about. When you stop raising interest rate, I’ll stop laying people off. Fair enough?
This logic can’t be more apparent from wall street’s forehead. I don’t know whether a kid can succeed in this case, as in most of cases, yes. But there’s one thing wall street needs to know.
The whole world, or just US per say, is not made of just wall street. It could consolidate while healing itself. This is what Feds called “soft landing”, meaning the entire economy could go flat or a bit lower without getting crashed. But Feds can’t speak this for wall street. IMHO, wall street could go destroy itself by destroying itself. You might scare the s*** out of everyone in that building, but they still own the building. Keep knocking down your own wall isn’t going to drive your neighbour out.
Breathe in and out as my will
In case, Feds is right, we don’t have a crash this time. Just say this could happen. Then wall street can f*** himself up very badly. Why? The society go consolidate, everyone still find his future jobs (either they like or not), and we get a peaceful economy (maybe dead but who cares) again.
But wall street lost couple of things along this journey:
- Money. The valuation devalued along this experiment won’t be recovered as everyone dreams. It takes one to two decades to build, but if it only takes one year to destroy, the confidence needs to be re-build in a more fundamental way. For lots of tech company, if the valuation can’t go up, it only means it can go down. And no one knows what is the bottom of these tech companies. Trust me on that.
- People. Tech isn’t the safe spot, and more importantly, smart people might find other things to do. It’ll be relatively hard to get these people back to wherever they were. Why? One, these people happen to make a lot of money in the past tide; Two they are still smart that they won’t settle for things that hurted them before. Don’t underestimate the man will and creativity in US. That’s another two edged sword.
- Market Share. Strategistically the only thing I think the company can get is the market share. So they are hoping if everyone cuts cost, then I won’t be the only one left with high labour cost. Well, the assumption is that everyone needs to shrink at the same rate. Which means, there’s no guarantee that each company’s market share will be intact after this exercise. Some could go down, some could magically go up, but some could be entirely gone. Because there can be a global market share reduction after this devalued process. Who told you we have to have you?!
IMHO, deliberately devaluing yourself, in this case one type of industry, is the worst thing done to yourself. That hurts your image publicly, your people that had faith in you, and your potential market share in the future. Almost a lose-lose situation, it’s worse than having beaten by your enemy. Even if you are forced to do that, you better do it slowly as pretending to be forced than willingly. There’s a morale cost here. We’re all people, aren’t we?
Summary
So why they still do it? It’s a million dollar question, but I believe it’s the kids asking for attention kind of thing, they can win only if they know the limit as well as the response from the environment, for instance, in our case, Feds and the people. Go figure, what would happen if you play with the fire.