What Happens Now to All the Laid Off Tech Workers?

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:15)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:16)

Tracy, have I ever told you my idea for a two-part podcast, or a series of two-part podcasts?

Tracy Alloway (0:24)

A series of two-part, is it the debate one?

Joe Weisenthal (0:27)

No, it's different. So I don't know about you, but most of the time, after we do these interviews, I usually have questions that I kick myself for not having asked.

Tracy Alloway (0:40)

Oh, yes, yes. So this often happens on the podcast because we often touch on kind of wide-varying topics and we're not experts in a lot of the things that we talk about. And often the first episode is sort of, you get to know your subject matter and then you leave it with even more questions.

Joe Weisenthal (0:58)

Yeah, so I often like kick myself like, oh, I should have asked that, obviously. And then the other thing that happens is you post, then the episode comes out and then like people on Twitter and elsewhere.

Tracy Alloway (1:09)

They talk about it.

Joe Weisenthal (1:10)

They talk about it, they're like, what I'm curious about is actually like, oh, that's really good question too. I should have thought of that. So like, I thought like a thing that we should do maybe one day is schedule like, have all episodes be two-parters.

Where we do an interview with a guest, take a week, sort of marinate on it, think about it, what are some questions we should ask? And then have the second episode scheduled.

Tracy Alloway (1:32)

I really like that idea. It's sort of like, it's almost the octopus model of podcast episodes where like one episode just springs forth a dozen new arms and legs that you can talk about forever.

Joe Weisenthal (1:46)

So today, we're kind of gonna be doing that. I think this might be close, I'm not sure what the record is, but this might be close to the soonest we've ever had a guest on so soon after they appeared on the show.

Tracy Alloway (2:00)

This is a pilot for podcast two-parters.

Joe Weisenthal (2:03)

The only other time I can think of is, we talked to Claudia Somme twice before the pandemic, and once because it was sort of like her general views on how to like forecast recessions, and then like two weeks later, like the pandemic was in view, and they're like, oh shoot, this might be really bad. So we had her on really fast, but this is gonna be close to that record, I think.

Tracy Alloway (2:22)

Yeah, sounds good. All right, let's do it.

Joe Weisenthal (2:24)

So we recently talked to Patrick McKenzie. He is a technology infrastructure, financial infrastructure specialist.

He worked for Stripe for six years. He's currently an advisor. He's the author of the Bits About Money newsletter. We talked to him about corporate IT, why it is the way it is, why does it seem to be years and years behind what we think of the cutting edge of software, why is it often clunky, why does it often have these big technical issues that could take a while to fix.

That was a great conversation. The public loved it, but there's a lot going on in software these days. And the other sort of big trend that we haven't really talked about is that for the first time in, I don't know, maybe like 15 years, we've been seeing all these tech layoffs.

Tracy Alloway (3:08)

Right, and I think there was a little bit of tension in that episode in that we were talking about why corporate software is so bad. So it's almost like, well, obviously there's a need for better software. And yet all these big tech companies that ostensibly provide these services are laying people off. But also in the broader macro picture, since we recorded that episode, we had a payrolls report that came out much, much stronger than anyone expected.

And yet we've seen these big tech companies lay off people. And so the question obviously becomes, is this something specifically about tech or are these layoffs sort of the first sign of something broader to come in the economy?

Joe Weisenthal (3:50)

And the other thing that everyone points out to when you see these announcements from Meta and Alphabet and various startups and Microsoft and Amazon, they've all done it, is like, they added so many jobs over the last two years that actually these layoffs are like fairly small in the grand scheme of things, even for these companies based on the amount of hiring that they've done.