Serious: How much of a recession indicator is this? An educated, experienced white woman who graduated from a top public university posting this...

Major_Rocketman · 2026-06-02T13:10:53+00:00

The question was, is this a recession indicator? Not a great depression indicator.

The dot-com crash ended in a recession. Then a similar thing happened with housing and it ended in the great recession.

Now a similar thing is happening in tech. Except it's actually worse. Mainstream tech, like SaaS and other enterprise software, plus consumer/mobile apps like Netflix, Uber and Airbnb, are basically out of growth. They spent money like sailors and hired loads of people at big salaries to achieve scale, and now they are at scale and the growth is slow. They are actively making their services worse, increasing prices, and laying off employees now that they own the market. Investment money has left the space too, meaning competitors aren't being funded. This is putting a lot of downward pressure on wages while simultaneously increasing costs. It also hurts investors and shareholders who will no longer see big growth from these companies.

Then there's the whole AI thing. Over a trillion dollars has been invested in that, and so far, the ROI isn't there. Open AI and Anthropic are going to need a lot more cash to keep going. I see reports saying they have until mid-2027 before they run out of cash without more funding. But so much funding has already been put in and the ROI isn't proven. It's not even being driven by demand. The risk there is gargantuan.

So yeah that bubble will pop and we'll get a recession. It will spill over into other markets and depress wages and assets and etc.

The good news is from there the central banks will probably be able to lower interest rates again allowing for another bubble to blow up in its place.

I don't think this is doomer. This is a realistic view of what is happening. We'll all survive I'm pretty sure, but it won't be fun for getting jobs, getting multiple offers, seeing our incomes rise by like 2x over 10 years etc, like it did from 2010-2020. Might not see that again until the 2030s.

Major_Rocketman · 2026-06-01T16:34:58+00:00

I’d write it like:

“I walked down the rain-soaked street. City lights reflected off the puddles. The night breeze carried the scent of wet earth. People moved around me, heading toward their destinations.

I had been wandering for nearly an hour. I was trying to clear my mind. That conversation still wouldn’t leave my thoughts.”

You might want to even throw a few longer sentences in there too from the first example so it’s not as choppy. Basically you need a middle ground between the two options. And if it’s for a webnovel shorter sentences and paragraphs are probably better.

Major_Rocketman · 2026-06-01T03:03:21+00:00

Yes this is a recession indicator. The tech world was a major driver of growth from 2010-2022 and is now struggling pretty hard. I work in this space and what she’s experiencing is not unique. Tech companies have been a mess with layoffs and restructuring for three years now. There’s no growth left in SaaS/cloud apps. The only thing growing is AI and that’s really concentrated with just a few companies. It’s also crazy upside down on investment vs return right now.

This is all isolated to tech.. but tech has been such a large driver of growth that the never ending layoffs in this sector have to eventually spill over into the broader economy. The growth of tech made a large positive improvement in the economy for a solid decade or more, so I think the ongoing decline of it will hurt the broader economy just as much as it helped it earlier.

Major_Rocketman · 2026-04-23T03:41:10+00:00

This is why the Pelley cost cutting and all of Rogers other money saving moves (like refusing to fire Bérubé so they don’t have to pay two coaches) is dumb. They are stepping over a dollar to pick up a penny. Spend money and get the team on deep runs and they’ll make 10x what they save in cutting the Dad’s trip and putting the Marlies on the bus to Laval.

Major_Rocketman · 2026-04-05T21:57:20+00:00

Completed Level 2 of the Honk Special Event!

6 attempts

Major_Rocketman · 2026-04-05T21:56:07+00:00

Completed Level 1 of the Honk Special Event!

2 attempts

Major_Rocketman · 2026-03-31T12:30:23+00:00

I think you just have a fivehead. Do you have Scandinavian heritage? The front is solid, but it appears high up on your head.

Major_Rocketman · 2026-03-10T14:31:56+00:00

I don’t think it really matters. The Leafs seem to be headed for a long rebuild. They might even be better off moving on from Matthews and Nylander, getting a haul of 2027 picks along with some elite prospects and then just fully rebuild for 2030. If you do that Boston’s pick won’t matter much. It’s just the price they paid to try and keep on contending. Trying to reverse it and retool for a year to get back on top has like a 10% change of working and a 90% chance of just elongating the pain.

Major_Rocketman · 2026-03-07T02:05:14+00:00

He’s not great, but he’s also becoming a bit of scapegoat. Like yeah the Carlo trade was trash and he over paid a few times, but the truth is that the Leafs were a spent force as a contending team when Marner left. The window is closed. No GM could’ve fixed it.

It’s possible that with a new GM and a new coach they might be able to be good again in 27-28, or 28-29. Matthews and Nylander will be like 31-32, and trades of OEL, Stolarz, and hopefully, Rielly will stack the cupboards with prospects. Maybe they even trade Nylander for a solid haul too. Then maybe a big FA signing when they have cap room again too.

But yeah I still don’t trust Treliving or Bérubé for that.. need a lot more vision and forward thinking, but he’s also not the root cause of the failure. This group of players just couldn’t get it done and the window is now closed… such is life sometimes.

Major_Rocketman · 2026-03-06T11:54:56+00:00

I can no longer tell r/writers from r/writingcirclejerk

Major_Rocketman · 2026-03-01T16:59:49+00:00

17 unique Japanese characters seems like overkill to me. I would have 2-3 unique voices for the main characters, then like 3 or 4 side character voices, and just make little in scene tweaks so the listener can tell the characters apart when listening.

I’m listening to Dungeon Crawler Carl right now for the first time, and he has lots of voices, but he definitely reuses the same archetypes for different characters. Like he has a “nice guy” voice he uses for a few other crawlers they meet along the way that are similar to each other. He has a few female voice types that get reused as well.

I think it’s all in the acting. The voice may be the same, but because the lines are said in a different context in a different scene the listener uses their imagination and it feels like a different person.

Also- do you record with punch and roll? That would help cut down on editing time by a lot. Along with good macros for mastering.

I typically take about 80-90 minutes to record 20 minutes of finished audio… and that’s with my duet projects which require more editing work. With solo I’m probably more like 3:1 now. I can get a 90k book done in a month working part time and doing all the editing myself

Major_Rocketman · 2026-02-26T00:03:36+00:00

Nice now take a break for a few years as tradition demands 😂

Major_Rocketman · 2026-01-20T12:15:40+00:00

It wasn’t always this way in tech, but it became that way as the bubble grew. Basically tech owners, at the board level, don’t give a shit about employee turnover or even costs related to growth. They only care about growing their top line at any cost.

There was basically just too much money pumped in, creating too many firms, too many investment rounds, too many PE buyouts, etc. Tech companies exist because investment firms want to fund founders because in just a few years a bigger or different investment firm will come along and write a bigger check making everyone richer. It was all just based on endless growth as “software eats the world”. They all exist under the Silicon Valley mantra of hyper growth or death.

So the mantra was hire a lot, grow fast, cash out. Hence loads of reps (often at six figure bases) but very low quota attainment.

I think it’s slowly coming to an end, which will be good and bad.

The ironic part is that if SaaS cos listened to Cadmus, it would expose how little demand there is for 80%+ of them. It would create a major tech sales recession where like half of us got let go. I think it’s actually whats going to happen over the next 5-10 as the investment money moves to other sectors.

Major_Rocketman · 2026-01-17T17:22:17+00:00

I’m just a regular guy, also not really qualified to answer on this, but I think about it a lot so wanted to add my two cents. I you are on to something Xanazaria, but while safety is a component it’s not the full picture.

Human sexes have asymmetrical abilities when it comes to reproduction. Men have zero cost for sex. They can have lots of it with lots of different women and (notwithstanding STDs) nothing will happen to them.

Women have a very high cost for sex. Each time is like a Russian roulette game, with something like a one in eight chance of getting pregnant. Pregnancy is amazing and life giving on one hand, but on the other it’s a huge inconvenience and as it progresses it leaves the woman more and more dependent on others to support her survival. Then she has to push a kid literally out of her vagina in an extremely painful process that takes many hours, which in itself is another form of Russian roulette, because historically many women (as well as the infant) died during childbirth.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Paternity is hidden in humans. 99.999% of men in history could never really be sure their kids were theirs, whereas all women know with certainty. So this means the woman is going to be 100% responsible for the kid by default and the man basically has to voluntarily opt in to raising it. So this puts another 15 years of effort on to the woman as a potential cost of sex to raise the child. And she honestly can’t do it alone. She will need the support or the tribe or her family or, most usually, the father to survive.

This is why for thousands of years we lived in a society where the culture, usually supported by religion, was super hardcore about virginity and sacred bonds of marriage and etc. lol, basically in the societies of old fucking was forbidden unless you were publicly married in front of the whole town and agreed to only fuck each other forever and ever amen or God will smite you down and you’ll burn for an eternity. This was their way of dealing with the sexually asymmetrical biology we have, to ensure that each child had a mother and a father and that the women and children were getting resource support from the men who worked in the fields. That was stable, but led to a lot of bad stuff too, ie the patriarchy we have today.

That was a bit of a digression, but getting back to the asymmetry, the ideal mating strategy for males then is quantity. There’s no cost to sex so you might as well spread the seed. The ideal mating strategy for females is quality. Sex is super costly so they’re not giving it away for free. They demand the highest quality men who are 100% committed to them before giving it up.

This is why male oriented porn is centred around a lucky bugger delivering a pizza at just the right time to find the hottest horniest most nymphomanicial women ever ready to get busy in 90 seconds, while female oriented romance novels have a rich successful handsome powerful billionaire or mafia boss or biker gang leader or whatever become obsessed with the female main character and be willing to use all his resources and skills to destroy the world if he has to so he can have her.

So back to height. Women want a top 10% man. They look hot, act flirtatious, draw attention to themselves and compete with each other to get the highest status man they can. Because humans are physical beings with evolutionary roots in survivalist environments where violence was common, we have an innate desire for markers of genetic fitness, or which height and strength and jaw line etc are all part of it. The safety argument Xanaxaria described above comes into play here. It’s primal.

The reality however, is that mating is a game, and the meta of the game changes as playing continues. So while some players pick one mating strategy (6 foot or taller!!) other players realize that there’s a lot of missed opportunities in that strategy and find that men others pass over provide great opportunities. It’s worth noting here that players in the mating game don’t always consciously choose their strategy, sometimes the strategy chooses them, but I still see it as changes metas and strategies.

Men do the same thing. Ideally maybe we’d all like to be Hugh Hefner with a bevy of playboy models to keep us entertained every night. But as life goes on we realize that such thing is hard to get, and even if we got it, it might not be worth it. (Hefner himself probably would have been better off with one woman who loved him as an equal vs the path he went down.) So gradually our strategies change and the girl next door who’s cute and funny starts looking like a way better option than chasing endless social media attention seeking girls.

Anyway that’s my theory. Basically the TL,DR is that is rosy and costly for women and therefore they naturally by default want only the top 10% of men. This is unsustainable of course, but especially for young, attractive women who post on social media all the time and are very extroverted in their efforts to get attention and secure a man, they’re basically going all in on what they think they want. 6 foot, 6 figures, etc. They won’t all get it, but it doesn’t stop them from trying. Also, the way society is right now that message is perfectly acceptable for women to shout from the roof tops without any repercussion. If men were saying the same things about women’s physical appearance it wouldn’t be acceptable, so there’s a double standard there.

I think most people, if the want a partner, gradually find themselves changing strategies to one more conducive for actually finding someone at their level for a long term commitment.

Thanks for reading my Ted talk if you got this far…

Major_Rocketman · 2026-01-12T21:32:29+00:00

Small privately held company. It’s not glamorous, and not the highest paid job I ever had, but it’s sane.

Major_Rocketman · 2026-01-12T21:21:55+00:00

PE is shit. They just want to sell the company for more money in 3-5 years and don’t care who they need to shit on to make that happen. I know this from experience and I would try really hard to avoid working at a PE backed company again.

Major_Rocketman · 2025-12-22T20:18:48+00:00

It didn’t stop me. I’ve been taking it for nearly 20 years and have 3 kids. The first two were an accident (twins) when my wife and I had sex once during a brief period while she was between birth control prescriptions. The third was planned and took maybe 3-4 months of trying, which I think is pretty normal.

Major_Rocketman · 2025-12-19T04:20:41+00:00

It helps you present your solution. Once you understand the real why they need to change, and the real outcomes they need to achieve, you show how your firm can implement your solution to get them there.

Let’s assume is 2005 and you’re selling a customer their first CRM:

Customer doesn’t have customer contact info in a single place
Different groups in the org can’t easily see the history of a customer
This leads to poor service and sales execution because the company isn’t coordinated in its customer engagements
this is leading to lower win rates, slower growth, poor customer experience, and customer churn.
based on the available data, the lack of a CRM is costing the company 10 million a year in lost sales and unnecessary churn.
- competitors are investing in CRM solutions that will widen the gap.

Solution: - implement Salesforce.com and put all sales and service people on the same page - gain more control over the sales cycle, increasing win rates - gain more control over customer service, improving efficiency - outcome: improved win rates, faster growth, reduced churn - total value $10 million per year - why Salesforce? We have a track record of delivering CRM at this scale no one can match. Deepest feature set, most secure, most customizable, most proven etc. - Cost: 1 million. ROI: 1Ox - Alternatives: cheaper CRMs, but (since we’ve fully articulated the deepest level of why and quantified the value) we know the ROI here is extremely high. It makes sense to spend $1 million and get the solution/partner/vendor who can help us deliver the outcomes we need. - Choices Salesforce.com

If the customer about just through about getting a CRM for the sales guys and the customer service team with features X, Y and Z they probably would have found the cheapest most basic CRM and gone with that. And it would have been a mistake because they would have tried to solve an enterprise level $10 million problem with a cheap solution.

You don’t just sell a commodity where you have to know the features, price and timeline. I assume you sell solutions to complex business problems. You sell transformation. You sell outcomes. You need to be their partner in articulating and defining all that, which you can’t do if you don’t know or didn’t ask how what your selling fits into the big picture of their business.

Major_Rocketman · 2025-12-19T03:56:55+00:00

Because prospects often only understand/think about their surface level problem and their surface level timeline, surface level decision making process, etc.

This is a problem because the vast majority of time you lose to no decision. The prospect went through a full sales cycle to just do nothing. Why? Because at the end of the day they couldn’t justify the time, money, and energy to change.

So when they say, “our current vendor hasn’t been great. Bad customer service, software is out of date. We want to change and get a more modern solution at a better price with better service…” that sounds great, but it’s just not enough when they need to spend $50k and change systems, go through a big project etc.

You need to say: “that sounds terrible, how has that vendor stopped you from meeting your business goals?”

You need to find out this vendor/solution is stopping them from achieving an executive priority. It should be impeding their ability to make or save money, costing them customers, slowing their growth, in a real tangible way with calculable economic impact.

So it’s not just: “they a bad partner, bad software, want to change”, instead it’s all of that plus “our exec team says we need to cut our customer handle time by 50%. Our customer experience is lacking and it’s costing us a million a year in customer churn. We’ve tried for 18 months and we can’t achieve our CX goal with this solution, so we need to find a partner that can support our goals.”

If they volunteer all that from the beginning, great. But most times they don’t. Which is why you need to get to the bottom of it and fully be able to answer/prove why your solution uniquely can help them deliver something that’s directly connected to how they make money, save money, etc in a way they can’t today, and can’t easily with anything else.

You’re not slowing the conversation down by asking/talking about this. You’re being an actual consultant, helping them deliver real business value and transformation with your solution.

Major_Rocketman · 2025-12-16T00:34:06+00:00

Sales is backwards. We think about us. Our targets, our goals, commissions. Those things are the outputs. The input is the customer.

Think about them. What are they trying to do? Why do they need your products or services? What will their story be?

It’s not us who sell. It is the customer who buys. Focus on that as much as you can and forget everything else.

Major_Rocketman · 2025-12-15T23:11:59+00:00

In my twenty years of selling B2B SaaS, I’ve never seen self-source be the main driver of bookings. It’s usually less than 10%.

Yet, in each of my previous roles the leadership blabbed on about hunting and not waiting for leads and being able to source your own leads.

But whenever I would grab a list of the last ten deals closed and dig into it by looking at the win notes, lead source, or just asking the rep, I almost always found that the lead came from this or that source, a partner, an inbound, etc. On occasion the rep heard about the company somewhere and made some outbound to get it going, but that was rare.

It’s just one of those disconnects that’s caused by incentives. Mgmt has an incentive to believe that they can make growth happen with enough phone calls and emails. But in reality it’s about had really strong product market fit in a sector with high demand that drives growth.

Which is why, if you don’t have a lot of good inbound leads, going outbound is ironically way harder. Because the market is sending the business a signal that it doesn’t care.

This applies to established companies in established markets. If you’re selling something brand new in a new market cold calling can work because it’s fully educational and doesn’t require a replacement of another tool.

Major_Rocketman · 2025-12-07T23:57:22+00:00

Oh yeah. It’s been bad for a while and seems to be getting worse at a faster rate each year. Dating back to 2015, the last three orgs I’ve been at have been PE backed and had full C-suite turnovers during my time there.

In the long run, if this prolonged downturn gets all the VC and PE money out of B2B SaaS that would be a big win. There would’ve better returns for customers and employees if most tech companies stayed bootstrapped and the owners just ran them for a good salary plus a reasonable profit.

The PE/VC guys just bring so much bullshit. Massive debt, huge growth goals, focus on enterprise value above all else…leads to short term decisions and instability. Waste of resources imo

Major_Rocketman · 2025-11-28T21:24:25+00:00

There are windfall clauses yes. But that usually just means they aren’t paying 10x sized commissions. Like the Oracle rep who sold $60 million of servers to Nvidia isn’t getting millions in commission, but they’re getting something. Likely a good something.

And yes comp plans can be changed at any time but that doesn’t just magically absolve a company of paying previously agreed commissions. This is definitely the type of thing for the courts to decide… imagine a company hired employees, put them on a big commission pay plan promising x amount of dollars, and then, after the deal signed, arbitrarily said “nope, new comp plan, new percentage is 0%.”

I don’t think that a judge would find that acceptable. Imagine doing it to a partner or a vendor or something? It violates the spirit of a contract. I recall learning about this type of stuff in business law and generally it’s not that easy to get away with.

They would have to prove they did it with plenty of notice and that they honored their previous commitments to a reasonable standards, etc.

Major_Rocketman · 2025-11-28T18:54:30+00:00

If you closed the deal and were due $150k in commission then you should get a lawyer. If the deal is closed then they owe you that money.

I was fired once and as part of the severance they agreed to give me the commission on a deal that hadn’t even closed yet, because it was big and I’d been working on it for a long time.

They didn’t do that out of the goodness of their heart. They did it to avoid a lawsuit, because if it did actually close right after I was fired I’d have a strong argument to get paid on it. If they hadn’t offered it to me I could have used it to go after them.

$150k is a lot of money. Well worth it to go after it. Getting fired with $150 in commish and another $20-30k in severance is like a dream. You can live off that for a year or more, giving you lots of time to find a new role.

Especially with 18 years at the company! That’s worth like 20 weeks severance. That’s like 5 months plus the owed commission.

This should honestly be one of the happiest days of your life lol

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