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Comment by scadge | Hacker News Reader

There are approx. 3.1 million employees[1] in India's IT sector. Is 56k (which is lower than 2%) so much?

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-approximate-number-of-IT-e...

US tech companies actually had much larger layoffs however this were again in very low ends. The high and middle ends are booming as if we are back in 2000 bubble. Due to such disparity one should always clarify what kind of tech jobs one is talking about.

From https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/news/2017/02/17/tech...

Computer, electronics and telecommunications companies shed more than 90,000 jobs last year, compared to nearly 80,000 in 2015, according to a new report out from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a global outplacement firm based in Chicago. Tech layoffs accounted for 18 percent of the total 526,915 U.S. job cuts announced in 2016.

Computer companies were hit especially hard; layoffs in the sector were up 7 percent in 2016. Dell Technologies (NYSE: DVMT) was responsible for much of the uptick when it converged with EMC last year and cut thousands of positions. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) also shed jobs, with Intel laying off 12,000 employees, or 11 percent of its workforce, per the report.

You're right it's a fairly small proportion, but when the workforce overall is growing by around ~1 million per month, growth within each sector is essential just to cope (figure source is 2 years old and not IT specific, but still likely to be broadly accurate: https://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2015/07/22/indias-labor-force/ )

I'd say that 2% of a whole industry being laid off is quite considerable, if 2% of the German car industry is laid off in a single year it'd be considerable, for example.

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