This really is the techpocalypse, huh? I’m young (35) but I’ve never seen layoffs so continuous. I wonder how far into the year this will go and if we’ll ever come back. Maybe companies truly will start offshoring.
I'm just old enough to have witnessed the dot-com crash a few years before I went into industry; this feels very similar. In fact, it feels a little less intense; the dot-com crash was about an entire business model consolidating under an absolute handful of winners (example: most independent online stores went "We can't compete with Amazon" and bankrupted, laying off everyone) while this one seems to be a lot more "All these firms will continue to operate but they don't think they need to employ this many people to do it."
It will be interesting to see if the consequence is new startups competing with the incumbents as those laid off find each other and some capital or if the consequence will be something else.
In my social group of about 30 folks, I think at ~25 of us all experienced months of unemployment, at the least.
Almost no one I knew worked right through it without being impacted, and some people had huge impacts. I worked as a contractor for 2 years afterwards before getting back into a startup. I knew some people who were out of work 6 months or a year and came back with huge pay cuts.
Tons of people I knew ended up with furniture and servers in their house they took when the company closed and management/investors didn't want any of it.
I got a desk and a nice office chair that way.
Related to that last thought, a lot of people bailed out into Boeing corporate jobs. They didn’t have Aeron chairs but they needed a lot of IT workers as they moved more online. I’m curious how that’ll go now where that process is much further along and things like cloud services have been soaking up geeneric demand.
Now we have a bunch of absolutely massive companies like Uber that have no way to make money, but the overall # of them is a lot smaller.
> Uber reported $595 million in profit
We'll be back, but not until the industry discovers something of actual value.
My internal narrative of all of this is that many of us came up during the smartphone revolution which legitimately created a ton of new value. Products that could not exist before now could (and did!), resulting in a flurry of new companies, new products, and new ways of making money. This was the driving force during the past tech boom.
Then I think we started reaching the end of the smartphone boom. The industry needed to find some new technology that would similarly open a similar phase of rapid growth. It chose to bet on the gig economy, followed by crypto. Both of those were near-complete busts.
I think a lot of the pain we're experiencing is rooted in this. We're past the smartphone explosion but no real technology since then has actually unlocked a whole lot of new value, and in fact has burned investors badly.
Until we actually find this next-step technology things will be in the doldrums. Lots of people are betting on "AI" (or really just LLMs), and time will tell - I suspect it will be pretty transformative for some players and product areas but not in the industry-shaking way that is currently being hyped.
I have no doubt we'll find this at some point - after all technology continues to march forward, but I'm not convinced there is anything necessarily imminent that will drive the kind of growth smartphones did.
AI has the property that it can reach all the people around the world. From AI that teaches you a foreign languages to automated advisors that can e.g. recommend a diet based on your needs or even AI dating where instead of sweeping AI will do the match (I would pay for the last option).
The problem with AI is that there was already "AI winter": high expectation in the beginning, but nothing workable delivered in the end in the late 70s if I remember correctly. I hope it will not end up like this, this time.
I also don't see much potential in metaverse. For one we are crazed about healthy lifestyle and siting with glasses to walk though some virtual landscape makes no sense to me. It will only make you weak and tired. For the second the tech is not there yet, we may fool our sense of vision and hearing, but we cannot fool our sense of orientation, neither our muscles.
Go read up on the .com bubble popping.
The layoffs look huge because the increase in headcounts were so huge in the past 2 years:
https://bsmedia.business-standard.com/_media/bs/img/article/...
It's like saying "I lost a ton of weight recently! I'm down 20 lbs!" when you gained 50 lbs over the last 2 years.
> Devaluing the dollar against a foreign currency.
Ok, so labour traded for global goods intermediated by cash means we can remove the intermediary and think about the just the work for goods trade.
Imagine I work 1 hour for 10 loaves of bread. If I get more bread for my time, my value has inflated, if I get less bread for my time my value has deflated.
Ok now lets add money to the picture. (please excuse unrealistic exchange rates and the lack of profit margins to help illustrate the point)
If I work 1 hour for $20 and it currently buys $30 CAD and $30 CAD buys 10 loaves of Canadian bread, then we have the same scenario as describe before. The price of bread on the shelf in USA is $2 USD, or 6 minutes of my time.
Now looks what happens when we devalue the USD...
I work 1 hour for $20 and it buys $20 CAD (Less than before), and $20 CAD buys 6 2/3rds a loaf of bread. The price of a loaf of bread on the shelf is $3 USD ($20 USD/6.66) or 9 minutes of my labor. See how the price in USD went up? That's the deflation of a currency against another currency.
And that's how US labor becomes "cheaper" because the rest of the world now gets 9 Minutes of your time for one loaf of bread.
>I moved from NYC to the Palo Alto area in May 2000. That's right, just one month after the start of the long stock-market collapse and two months after the NASDAQ's peak, although of course no one knew these things at the time. I thus got to experience both the highs (insane traffic on 101, Sand Hill Road absolutely packed for two hours each afternoon) and the lows (significantly-better traffic on 101--admittedly a good thing in and of itself--and hordes of people losing jobs and moving back home each month).
>It's important to distinguish between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The Valley has recovered--traffic on 101 has long since become awful again, as today reminded me--but San Francisco still hasn't regained the equivalent of all those bubble-related jobs that vanished into the wind in the 2001-2002 time period, and probably never will. (I've been living in San Francisco for going on two years now and have yet to meet anyone who is working in a "Web" or "e-commerce" job up here. It's like a neutron bomb; the people went away but the buildings stayed.) By contrast, yes, the Valley lost tons of jobs, too, but at least the Valley had, and has, a longtime core of companies that made real products that do real thing dating back to the Fairchild/HP/Intel days. And on the Web side, of course, Google and Yahoo! are leading the charge. They're down there, though, and not up here. Unless and until another bubble develops, I expect San Francisco will remain a remarkably tech jobs-free (but with plenty of finance, retail, and other non tech-related companies) city on the edge of the world's greatest concentration of tech jobs.
Obviously I didn't know that there indeed soon would be another bubble in SF, this time a social media-driven one.
Also, if you're an engineer, keep in mind the org mix in layoffs. AFAIK It's more like the recruiter-pocalypse as companies do not foresee needing those headcount to increase headcount... Yes some engineers in the mix, but not a major component...
Yes, we came back. Nobody learned from the experience.
Github grips immense power and money. Just look at their position.
1. Owned by Microsoft but allowed to operate independently.
2. Microsoft owns VScode and now works closely with OpenAI, OpenAI is used for Copilot.
3. Created Copilot. For some this is not a big deal but for me in my tech stack it's been life changing. I save about 15-20% of my time by using it. This is an insane advancement that's only rivaled by ChatGPT for productivity (Another OpenAI project). Because Microsoft owns VScode, of course there's tight integration with Copilot there.
4. It's freaking Github, they house code for a huge portion of all code projects. 85% market share I think. They use the code to train copilot and whatever else.
Now you tell me why a company in this position had to lay off 10% of staff today. They didn't. They wanted to. That's fine, they're a company and sometimes culling the heard is the right thing to do. It just grinds my gears when companies act like it's what they needed to do. I'd rather they be honest and just say their true intentions.
They like everyone else hired too fast and the free covid money boom is over.
There also hasn't been a large wave of companies failing outright.
This one doesn't seem anywhere near as dire, despite the large numbers flying around (at least, not yet)
We are not looking at some tech decimation. The companies were spending like drunken socialist sailors during the pandemic because the oracles in upper management saw us all staying home forever. And now they are snapping back to the sizes they actually were.