How do you view the wave of Internet layoffs?
In the past year, these domestic Internet companies have not lived well. Since the beginning of this year, all major factories have been laying off employees. According to the news, the layoff ratio has ranged from 10% to 30%. What is even worse is that some marginal departments that do not make money face the direct layoff of the entire business line. In the middle of last year, the staff of various large factories expanded, and I predicted at the time that there would be this wave of layoffs this year.
From the beginning of the epidemic in 2020, the Internet industry is one of the few industries that has not been greatly affected by the epidemic, and even some businesses have benefited from the epidemic, such as games and online office. In the past two years, many large factory teams have expanded rapidly. The byte education team has a bold statement to recruit 10,000 people a year. The team that the author is in has more than doubled its staff in just over a year.
However, behind the rapid expansion of personnel, the business did not grow along with it. Especially last year, due to a series of anti-monopoly policies, domestic capital has gradually shrunk. Superimposing the general direction of “common prosperity”, the state requires enterprises to actively participate in the three distributions. Not long after the country proposed common prosperity, Tencent and Ali each took out a 50 billion “investment certificate”. It is foreseeable that in the future, more and more platform companies will take part of their profits and redistribute them to the society. You can understand it as “slaughtering the fat sheep”, or it can be understood as entrepreneurs raising their political awareness and social responsibility awareness.
On the other hand, the development of Internet companies abroad is also affected by political factors. We often hear news that our APP has been removed from the shelves of a certain country, or it is included in the sanctions list of such and such, which makes our products It is difficult to develop overseas markets. This internal and external attack has changed the underlying growth logic of the Internet, and the previous model of staking money by burning money can no longer work. In the past, an Internet company often spent hundreds of times its PE, which everyone took for granted. After all, it was a “tech company”, but in fact, do these companies really have any technological content? Selling vegetables and bringing goods under the guise of a technology company, and relying on the accumulation of manpower to increase production, I think it is more like the “Foxconn” of the software industry.
For enterprises, employees are a resource . When the economic situation is good and the business is expanding, the surplus value of employees will be more, and capitalists will squeeze as much labor value as possible and convert it into corporate profits. At the same time, most employees are also willing to be squeezed, because when the capitalists are full, these workers can naturally drink soup with them. With the joint efforts of capitalists and the working class, greater value has been created. It’s a virtuous circle. But in times of bad economic conditions and business contraction, employees are no longer a positive resource. The company has to pay at least twice the cost of wages for each employee. If the residual value brought by the employee is lower than the cost paid by the company, the employee becomes a consumable . Abandoning “consumables” as soon as possible is the easiest and fastest way for companies to save costs. After all, capitalists do not open companies for charity. This is the logic behind the layoffs as I understand them.
In short, in a capitalist society, companies rely on layoffs to reduce costs, which is understandable in my opinion, which sounds a bit cruel, but this is how it works. Of course, the premise is that the company normally pays employee salaries and compensation in accordance with labor laws.
Under the wave of layoffs, what should we do?
Improve personal competitiveness and practice internal strength.
This is a society of survival of the fittest. If you want not to be eliminated, you can only improve your competitiveness and equip yourself with the ability to create greater value. In large companies, the irreplaceability of employees is very low. Improving personal competitiveness is also improving one’s irreplaceability. For us as technology, it is very important to improve the technical level. In addition, logical thinking ability, communication and expression ability, including language level are also essential, even I think it is more important than mastering a framework or learning a programming language. Technology is just a tool. If you change an industry or position, these professional knowledge may become invalid, but those soft qualities will accompany you for life. Moreover, I have recently realized that the level of writing code depends on the level of language. Writing a program is actually no different from writing an article. It is all about extracting and processing information and expressing it in the form of words.
Don’t put eggs in the same basket.
Most people’s wages are the only source of income. Once the job is gone, the income is gone. How to reduce the irreplaceability of work to me, so that I can live a normal life even without this job, this is also a question I have been thinking about recently.
Don’t go into debt.
For today’s young people, the mortgage is basically the only debt. My suggestion is that it is best not to take out a loan to buy a house at this time and overdraft your future, unless this house is of great significance to you, and you will be ruined if you don’t buy it. But in my opinion, regardless of whether house prices will drop in the future, the house itself is not so meaningful, it is just a fixed asset. When you don’t have the ability to swallow this asset, by adding leverage to forcibly get on the bus, it only brings endless pressure and huge debt.
Stay optimistic and long-term.
Although the economic environment is not good, I don’t think it is necessary to be too pessimistic. No matter how many years there are, human beings always have the need to obtain information and communicate. The Internet has well met these needs of human beings. Therefore, this industry is just adjusting, becoming like water, electricity, and coal in traditional industries, becoming the infrastructure of society, and will not disappear. From a long-term perspective, the layoffs of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s were far more violent than the current Internet layoffs, and the impact of the Internet bubble in the early 21st century was also greater than it is now. Standing twenty years later, and looking at today, perhaps it is just a small wave of the times.
Occasionally I will talk about technology and life here. My WeChat public account: where the bear writes.
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