alt Hacker NewsThere's something I didn't get about the discourse about this, maybe someone can explain. The tax change greatly affected small businesses/startups with unstable revenue, right? But companies like Amazon, Google, etc are much more established companies with diversivied, stable revenue and longer term planning I'd assume - so it doesn't seem like this should have affected them as much.
The popular story currently is that the massive layoffs were due to the tax/accounting change, but in that case why the big players like Amazon etc have so many layoffs? Or is that the popular story because, while Amazon etc are large, by total employee count most people are employed at smaller business that were more affected by this?
Or was the FAANG stuff actually AI after all? The tax change story sounds more plausible to me but I can't connect everything.
Its a combination of factors. The end of ZIRP made raising money more expensive and the tax change made hiring Software Engineers more expensive. Small businesses faced existential challenges and cut back, so now there was less demand from them. Then Big Tech realized they needed to layoff to post better numbers to continue boosting their stock (even though they made enough revenue) so started cutting jobs.
With this change one of those factors has been eliminated, so we will see startups/small businesses become a lot more competitive.