More big companies bet they can still grow without hiring

They may have all the power, but all of this shows is they have no idea how to wield it. The job market is horribly broken, there are inefficiencies everywhere, and their hedging/procrastination on what to do with hiring and growth is tanking the economy (and their customers ability to purchase their products).

If their goal is reducing wages through layoffs/attrition and lowballing new hires, they aren't going to get it without triggering a recession or worse.

> It is reasonable for companies to increasingly target that small part of population and sell them the same (small) number of widgets /services in higher prices and see their profits go up.

(Joke), well, if they keep convincing the small part of the population to spend ever increasing amount of money on "better" widgets...

In reality, if too many people are unemployed, no one's going to be able to buy things so that companies can have profits!

That being said, what I read is that a lot of companies are doing general housekeeping and trying to avoid bloat.

Agreed. There is sort of a vicious feedback loop at play too:

1. Large tech firms overhire like crazy

2. Interest rates go up, firms layoff tens of thousands of workers who never should have been hired in the first place

3. Firms pile more work on to remaining people, cut their pay relative to inflation

4. Existing workers threaten to leave, companies let them because "Look at all the talent on the market!"

It's abject lunacy, and companies are all too enthusiastically degrading the quality of their own workforces. The upshot is that this will pry some entrenched talent and experience out of large employers and into smaller companies. But the latest crop of MBA whiz kids are really something special.

Looking back at recent years. I can give AI as a true innovation. But outside that. What new thing has been actually done by all of these people? Say in past 5 years? Lot of hiring, but what has been the outcome?

Twitter is a concrete demonstration of this. There were so many prognostications [0] that Twitter would imminently implode after downsizing from ~8k to ~1.5k employees following Musk's takeover, and when these claims never came to pass, it was a wake-up call to the rest of the industry [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964

[1] https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/elon-musk-fired-80-p...

For years, we've talked about how much of the workforce was "bullshit jobs". HN would be full of incredulous comments from people confused by the headcount at various companies, wondering what all those people were doing every day.

Now we're in the worst case scenario- hundreds of thousands of middle-class "bullshit jobs" are disappearing, but rather than being replaced by a wave of productive jobs (say, in clean energy, non-polluting manufacturing, regenerative agriculture, medical technology, biotech, public transportation infrastructure, housing construction, etc) we're just seeing unemployment, underemployment and government policies that are openly hostile to anything helpful for society.

America could probably still be saved by a "Green New Deal" type of program which spurs massive investment and employment in industries which have positive externalities. Things don't exactly look like that's likely in the next few years, but maybe the 2024 election was the wake-up call the Democrats needed to reorient away from the "woke" social issues and reengage with the average American voter.

How does this jive with all of the big tech cos sitting on a Smaug's cave level of dollars? There's rainy day funds, but having billions in cash and cash equivalents seems odd.

I hope you are right, but my understanding is that the high headcount in engineering could, in large part, be offset by American tax exemptions for engineering salaries and that this exemption is being actively sunset.

See: https://www.corumgroup.com/insights/major-tax-changes-us-sof...

https://technical.ly/startups/r-d-tax-change-reversal-startu...