Q1 of 2023: The most Tech Layoffs in history | Hacker News Reader

Q1 of 2023: The most Tech Layoffs in history

lunduke.substack.com

23 pointsmyth_drannon17 comments

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For those who find themselves suddenly with unexpected free time I recommend taking the opportunity to watch:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...

Pirates of Silicon Valley (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_(TV_series)

And a couple of really long walks to recalibrate. This too, shall pass.

and for those suddenly replaced by AI

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407362

This article made me so annoyed. Absolute doesn't matter, I want to see the percentage laid off!

Industry is much larger now than it was in the dot com bubble...

Agreed - classic clickbait technique.

Exactly. Besides, these layoffs seem confined to the FAANG and well-known SV companies. During the dot com bubble it was every company throughout the U.S. having an IT department who was laying off. This doesn't have anywhere near that global feel.

This doesn’t feel correct to me. I graduated with a CS degree in 2001. Companies were downsizing and shutting down when I started working in the fall of 2001.

To complain more concretely: I think the stats are wrong. The dot com bubble didn’t really burst until 2001 - but this post cites statistics between “December of 1999 and January of 2001”.

It also doesn’t say where it got it’s 2000s stats from.

Also, often in 2001 companies were closing rather than laying off percentages. Or do they count those as layoffs anyway?

_If_ you trust the stats, it supposedly does - it says it counts:

employees laid off (or lose their jobs due to Tech companies going out of business)

Did they have rounds of layoffs first before closing down? Because this may just be the beginning. The fed rates generally take 9-12 months to hit the real economy. We're going to be feeling this for a while.

They did.

But I still feel this is different. In 2001, there were _loads_ of companies that were started in the mid-late 90s on internet hype, and either had literally no business model apart from ‘drive up engagement and we’ll work it out later’, or had a business model (‘deliver pet food quickly’) that just wasn’t working, and growth charts that should it wouldn’t in the foreseeable future.

They’d all been just hemorrhaging cash for years. Is that as widespread now?

This feels more like an established industry that’s taking the (perhaps ill advised) opportunity to make itself more (on paper, at least) efficient to me.

SV jobs were all over the place in mid 2001. After 9/11, they were gone. Took me 9mos to find a gig after that. It sucked

Yeah, agreed. When I started working in the fall - at a company that didn’t have layoffs, at a job I was offered in the spring - there were layoffs and closures happening at other places all around me and I remember feeling sort of guilty about it.

Industry is much bigger so maybe total numbers are higher but I would be surprised if it the total percentage of workers laid off in the industry is higher than the dotcom

The main contribution of this article appears to be a 54343 number for the people laid off during the 2000 dot com bubble, but I couldn't find a reference to back up that number.

The numbers and charts for this year's layoffs are from https://layoffs.fyi/

While the numbers may not lie, do they mislead?

I do not feel this is a complete story without comparing employment to 2019, nor without mentioning how many companies have gone bankrupt.

what about the loss in percentage points of the tech workforce? Has the overall number of tech related jobs remained stable for over twenty years so percentage points would have no relevancy?

Alright... So JPOW when are interest rates coming down to correct for this correction?

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