this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
255 points (98.1% liked)

Technology

57418 readers
4806 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Nearly 25,000 tech workers were laid off in the first weeks of 2024. Why is that?::undefined

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The anticipation is not that it'll hurt the tech companies, but the economy as a whole. A generalized economic slowdown impacts everyone, even if you specifically benefited from it.

If I could tell you exactly how it'll unfold, I'd be using that to make a lot of money instead. It's not even certain that it will happen.

Commercial real estate was for a long time a roughly predictable investment, and profitable.
Now profitability is severely reduced because people, including tech companies, are cutting their usage.
If the market collapses, it's unclear how far down it'll drag the economy, so companies are bracing for it to be bad.

[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Hopefully they’re wrong. Commercial real estate should have no direct impact on most tech

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 2 points 6 months ago

It shouldn't, but there shouldn't have been a connection between home mortgages and the auto industry either.
It's not just the connectedness of the industry sectors, but their mutual connection to financial markets.

[–] bitwaba@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago

It won't.

It will have indirect impact. The question is how much.

If the entire economy is down, people have less disposable income. The big income areas in tech are advertising, goods sales, monthly streaming services, and cloud compute.

Less disposable income = less people buying things they're advertised, less people buying shit they don't need off Amazon, less people keeping their Prime, Netflix, YouTube Premium, Spotify, or Disney+ accounts active, and less cloud compute resources needed to drive e-commerce websites.