I think a good chunk of the layoffs over at Twitter dealt more with people just not working hard enough and the place being overstaffed but the company itself IS bleeding money, especially with lost revenue coming from ads. Facebook on the other hand has lost a substantial amount of money from security and privacy concerns as well as Meta (parent company) failing. Now we have Amazon reportedly laying off 10,000 employees as soon as this week.
On top of all that, we have had the recent issue with FTX basically robbing investors blind and finances just seem to be in shambles across the board with stock, crypto, and everything else.
With everything heading this direction, do you think this will impact tech development in 2023 and beyond? Will these layoffs just continue to hurt the economy?
I believe this all deals more with stocks than anything. The stock market is not looking good. Investors are pulling out and that means companies will be looking to downsize just to keep productivity and projects moving forward. Humanity has always found a way to reach progress so I am not really concerned about this hindering technology development at all.
The FTX news is crazy. I was reading into it more. That guy and his group of friends ripped off so many people. Basically took their investments and gave it to politicians in the US. Not good. I am not sure how this will impact the economy but it likely soured a lot of people in terms of crypto. Going to make governments crack down even harder I would imagine.
I don’t see anything slowing down. Most of our growth has happened in spite of war, economic disasters, and trouble with general societal issues. Technology is on the verge of a next boom and I can’t wait to see what comes of it.
This is just corporations looking to cut corners. They need to raise prices because of inflation and trade costs going up but they can’t raise it too much as they will lose customers. Instead, they fire people. This is the same for tech companies as well. When inflation hits, the cost of everything from eggs to computer parts go up.
That is actually a good point. I always forget a lot of these big businesses rely on investors to keep their growth up and if they pull out, that can cost them millions.
I see the rest of your points as well that this shouldn’t really effect technology growth in the grand scheme of things. I guess I just see finances going up in smoke left and right and I have to worry. Where I work might be laying off people in January 2023, I just found that out today.
So moving forward, which tech-based companies do you think will have huge impacts in spite of everything happening?
Tesla, Apple, Alphabet Inc., Cisco Systems, and SAP to name a few.
I would say most of the tech leaders will be moving to advance projects, especially those dealing with the environment as well as medical care. I am hoping to see some investments in smart green houses for growing food year round as well as insect control without the use of pesticides.
With everything Elon and his team are pushing for, I see both SpaceX and Tesla pushing the boundaries for sure. As much as I like the electric vehicle technology, it needs a lot of work (within the batteries) before it is perfected and I think Tesla will be the one to get us there.
In terms of computer technology and robotics, NVIDIA and Microsoft are currently working on a huge cloud AI system that I will be keeping an eye on. Not the biggest fan of Microsoft in terms of privacy but we can’t ignore the tech.
This is the company that owns Google, right? I don’t entirely remember.
Last I heard about them, they were losing money and funding and Google is facing a lot of lawsuits right now for downloading apps to track people dealing with private medical information without their consent.