Ericsson to lay off 8,500 employees | Hacker News Reader

Ericsson to lay off 8,500 employees

reuters.com

256 pointsmfiguiere153 comments

Interestingly I work at Ericsson Germany and we only got notified of this today. Just six days ago I commented:

> Oh no. Since a large part of many medium-large sized tech companies' management style seems to consist of "copy what Amazon and Google are doing", I am scared of what silly decisions in other companies this might inspire.

I feel that my model of Ericssons upper management has been validated with one more data point, which is one reason why I would not be all that bummed if it turns out to hit me.

Don't worry, small-to-medium software companies do exactly the same.

Well, at least Germany is at the brink of a recession. And the signs are there to see for quite a while now. Companies restructering and preparing for an expected economic downturn can be hardly called bad management. Also, not eveything is driven by Big Tech, nor does everyone just copy ehat FANG is doing.

Germany and the rest of the EU have been "at the brink of a recession" for well over a year. (Remember the gas price increases started in October-November 2021, before the war.) Compared to a year ago, a recession seems almost unlikely by now, and if any, seems like it would be small. The US also seems to have avoided a recession. So this is strange timing to me.

I also don't see any companies outside tech doing massive layoffs.

All these layoffs we’re seeing were planned well over six months ago. It’s not coordinated or copy-cat. However, it may be that all the bean counters learned the same lessons in the same schools. So, given certain scenarios, their best answer is: layoff people.

> All these layoffs we’re seeing were planned well over six months ago

Source? Most of the layoffs I've seen have been poorly planned and hastily implemented.

To add to this, there's a massive difference between discussing the possibility due to other tech layoffs that occurred last year and actually planning a layoff.

I agree

My sources are folks who have been in these layoff discussions for six months. I should have said “some” or “many” instead of “all” since I don’t have sources in “all” these places.

It's definitely not like Ericsson went on a hiring spree during covid, like most other companies that are now laying people off. Their employee numbers have barely changed since 2019.

People in tech need to stop thinking that tech is special industry that was just invented in last 10 years.

Layoffs in response to an economic uncertainty/slowdown were not invented by Amazon/Google/Meta/Musk. They're as old as economy is.

Except that in the « old » economy, you would be hard pressed to be allowed to fire thousands of people with a P&L showing billions in profit (at least in France).

Easy: Close the ehole division or site and move it abroad. The lay offs will be more expensive so, sure.

Yeah not in the US, if anything the past decade has been very good for programmers when compared to other industries. There are lots of industries in the US that are more ruthless than big tech.

Note - I'm not making a statement on the current layoff, as I know nothing about Ericsson.

That logic is flawed. Past performance is not indicative of future results. If you see big slowdown coming, isn't it better to prepare for it early? Do you have to wait till you're losing money?

That logic is also flawed. If you see a big slowdown coming, why would you continue making large acquisitions? Why sweep thousands of various ranks rather than tighten your ship carefully where it matters?

Because employees are primarily a cost vs output equation for public companies in particular (and that's even more true with gigantic firms). Acquisitions are broadly viewed as expanding shareholder value (whether accurate or not in a given situation).

The stock market tanked thanks to the Fed rate hikes. It's believed shareholders will respond positively to cost optimizations. So they'll try to hold the line on growth while boosting margins re cost centers.

It's quite straight-forward thinking as it pertains to getting a positive reaction from shareholders.

The question for that context is: are your cost centers well optimized, or can you trim staff (real-estate holdings, inventory, whatever)? That's a very common question that would be pushed at public companies by large institutional shareholders.

Big tech is extraordinarily bloated with labor. They frequently grow at almost comical rates in terms of adding unnecessary employees (they do it just because they can afford to hoover up the talent to keep it from their competition; one common path forward in the hierarchy for managers is to grow their staff count and expand their footprint), and pretty much everyone knows it. It happens with every fast growth era in tech.

We agree, staff trimming makes far more sense. However, what is happening isn't staff trimming.

Are there any papers regarding the labor bloat specific to tech? Everyone believing in something doesn't make it true so I would love to read more about that beyond the usual memes of "girls on tiktok posting about their day in tech".

Actually, this idea that it's done because of bloat signals something interesting. The reply above claims these layoffs happen because of the future potentially showing massive slowdown - however, why are we trusting what these companies feel about the future when they got their pandemic move completely wrong? They thoroughly believed (apparently, so they say in their layoff emails...) that this growth was going to continue, so obviously they don't have the best grasp on how to make decisions for the future. Entirely negating the above reply that this is due to impending slowdown.

Google had $60B in net income last year. Meta had $23B in net income last year. Amazon had -$2.7B in net income last year. The year before they had $33.3B. Tesla had $12.5B in net income last year. Ericsson had $1.8B in net income last year. Apple (who didn't do layoffs) had $95.2B in net income last year.

Sure, they can't achieve those record profits for four years in a row, but none are losing money soon.

I don't understand what net income has to do with anything. Profit, not income, is the only thing that matters.

net income is another word for profit (confusing I know)

Yeah, but you also wouldn't see 200% YOY headcount growth in larger companies.

The companies that actually grew responsibly (aka not FAANG) are generally doing less/smaller layoffs/none at all.

Ericsson is as far from those as you could be.

I was speaking more broadly of the tech industry but yes in this case you're correct.

What this tells me is that there is a really big slowdown (Depression?) coming that threatens even the huge COH of that these companies currently have.

This new economy was one of extremely low interest rates.

Ericsson is a bit of a bell-weather company with broad exposure globally. It is the Intel of network equipment providers. It is concerning.

Well that's France, where like in Italy and Germany. it's much more difficult to fire any one person, a department, or N% without much advance notification and government approval. For the worker, it's a very good thing.

Americans don't know how bad they have it and don't remember the mass layoffs of the 1980's and 1990's. A time when jobs became scarce because nearly every company was following suit and REAL unemployment, including those who stopped looking for jobs, rose considerably. The REAL labor participation rate in the US is more like 55% rather than 62% due to the rosy and flawed methodology used to count U-1 through U-6. There are millions fewer middle-aged workers now than there were historically. Ageism, discrimination, and other factors discourage workers from seeking to reenter the workforce. Low skill workers have it worst, cannot always move great distances, and cannot always retrain into magical hypothetical jobs that don't exist. Many underemployed people become Uber and Lyft drivers, where there is the perception of freedom but there is net underpayment and abuse (no help with capitalization, depreciation, and maintenance of a vehicle make their effective pay well below that of taxi drivers).

The global situation is the US Fed's fault for giving out free money for years and then suddenly being a Grinch because they don't like "excess consumption" when there have been shortages and supply chain disruptions. US trucking is still a mess.

You can absolutely fire people in France and many companies have done it by the thousands. They just did not happen to have billions in profits at the same time.

No doubt helped by the modern neoliberalism* wave of Macron.

And raising the retirement age.. and more austerity too?

* For anyone unfamiliar with the term: think corporate "Liberal" (conservative lite) inspired by the American Clinton dynasty including Obama and Biden who are pro-neocolonialism, anti-union, anti-worker, and "tough on crime". Macron's type is sometimes seen as a "palatable compromise" compared to the regressive fascist nationalists like Le Pen.

> Americans don't know how bad they have it

a lot of us are pretty aware... just powerless to change things en masse.

That outlook has a name: "learned helplessness". It's the belief of lacking power that is the problem. There is plenty of power that can be had when workers organize. Don't cross taxi unions in France or they'll burn shit down. Cross French farmers and they will clog the highways and streets of Paris.

As a global perspective: American employees tend to lack testicular fortitude because they lack hope, knowledge, and self-worth.

yeah you can't compare france and the entirety of the us. france is the size of one state in america. the power to change things en masse in america lies in the congress which is outsized controlled by smaller states that want the country to go back to the 1600s. you simply can't understand the power of corporations, common law, and the incredibly conservative supreme court the last 40 years. you know nothing of the scale of america.

Or hoarding talent simply to take them off the market and keep them from potential competitors. I feel like this is a relatively new development, at this scale at least.

Few things here: first there's very few big techs in the country, which mean layoffs in the thousands are unlikely. The second thing is that big companies (even the software ones) use an army of external consultants precisely to go around law governing work. They can then go let off people without technically firing anyone.

except the tech industry has been immune to layoffs because it would represent such bad PR to be the one company downsizing in the midst of a bull market. Fortunately for the tech industry, the market is now bearish and they're finally allowed to trim the fat that they've been accruing for over a decade, which is why when someone finally blinked first then the rest followed (and continue to follow).

If there was so much fat to trim, why have they been relentlessly growing headcount for the last 2 years?

The view of laying off in a bull market being bad PR implies those companies wanted to lay people off in the first place.

During the bull market they were fighting with each other to hire more, which is the opposite signal.

Sure the bear market allows them to layoff, but I don’t think they wanted to lay anyone off up until 6 months ago.

Tech / IT is of course special, because it was seen (correctly) as an engine of indeterminately large growth: software scales really well, and integrated circuits are almost as good, currently limited by production capacity, not market demand.

For this tech received very special treatment, colossal P/E, a shower of investment, all in an attempt to grab a slice of this wildly growing pie.

But almost every exponent in reality is a bottom part of an S-curve. The growth was indeterminate, not infinite. As growth stalled or reversed, the special treatment did not exactly stop, but its extent contracted severely. Questions about actual profitability started to arise, for instance.

We don't, I already went through this several times since the first .com wave.

And seeing the support we got in several times via the union fellows in the European countries I have worked on, is also a reason why I am quite supportive of them.

Ericsson has been firing like this previously, it's not new. For example in 2015, and several times before.

That was the end of the last deployment cycle (at least in the US), when the wave of 3G to LTE deployments stopped.

Probably people were "wishing" for the economies not to plateau or go into recession. Remember how they were saying, well, that's not the official definition, claiming the working definition used was not relevant. I think many believed that rhetoric and are now in a situation where they are confronting reality.

I'm a former Ericsson field engineer, These layoffs seem to have more to do with the normal telecom deployment lifecycle (aka LTE and 5G deployment periods winding down) than anything else.

Telecom equipment sales is often very cyclic.

To note further, Ericsson, Nokia et al, shouldn't be thought of as IT companies in the same vein as Google, Apple and Facebook. They exist in a very different parallel universe.

Indeed, telecoms is not the same thing, specially in what concerns standards, patents, kind of software that gets developed versus hardware and so forth, former Nokia Networks over here.

> Nordic rival Nokia (NOKIA.HE) has not announced any plans to lay off employees.

This prompted me to think, is Nokia still around? Then I looked it up and:

> In 2020, Nokia employed approximately 92,000 people[6] across over 100 countries, did business in more than 130 countries, and reported annual revenues of around €23 billion.[4]

Ok, that was surprising.

The better known part of Nokia for most people was their mobile phone business, which was spun off and sold to Microsoft who then drove it into the ground, but the other parts of the company are still there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mobile

> drove it into the ground

If you mean they're not as prevalent as they were, sure I suppose. But they sold the business unit off again to HMD Global, who still make Nokia phones, such as the '3.4', the Android One (which is what led me to it - reasonably stock and years of updates - I previously had a Motorola for the same reason) device I'm typing this comment from.

> But they sold the business unit off again to HMD Global, who still make Nokia phones

They sold/licensed the brand. Apart from the name, there's nothing in common with the old Nokia.

I mean, that easily could've (and I'm sure was) said when Nokia sold their D&S division in the first place.

Does that make a difference? The brand was clearly the thing that most people cared about, hence why it's stuck around.

Nokia was already floundering in the consumer space; at least this way the name is still out there.

My understanding was they sold the branding to HMD Global who are still making Nokia branded smartphones, but also sold the actual feature phone business to Foxconn

Well this is a complete tangent, and I'm not at all claiming it's what I meant in GP, but increasingly I'm thinking (or realising) that 'a brand' is all a business is. So much is just the same crap minimally packaged, marked up, and branded to sell for as much as possible.

Even if you, as I do, buy decent traditionally marketed clothes made from natural fibers - the company selling them, unless it's an actual tailor you can literally take some cloth to, is nothing more than a brand on top of an Indian (say, probably - at least in my market) wholesale operation.

There is, because there are several former employees at the Finn offices of the new "Nokia" branded phones.

“Drove it into the ground” is, I think, unfair. The entire market was moving to Android and iOS. Microsoft and Nokia were late to the transition, tried to catch a section of the market, and failed. The succeeded in creating good products at the time, but having a good product is not enough, especially if you’re late to the market.

yeah I was a windows phone head. The Nokia Lumia 920 to this day is my favorite phone I've ever owned. But they just could not get any traction.

Same, the coolest phone I owned, and it was a joy to use. Even the un-official snapchat was miles ahead of the "real" one on Android.

I had one too; was a great phone even though I don’t care for windows

You need to search for "Operation Elop". There's a free e-book that details the whole thing to a striking degree (I was at Vodafone at the time, and... well... What I know confirms all of it).

"Operation Elop - The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones"

https://medium.com/@harrikiljander/operation-elop-6f2b043f52...

Note - full book on medium - it makes my Firefox on Android cry...

> This page hosts various alternative formats of the Medium book Operation Elop which is an English translation of the original Finnish book Operaatio Elop. You can read the story of this translation project over at Nokia People, a forum for ex-Nokians. The English translation is made available for free, with the permission of the original authors, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

https://asokan.org/operation-elop/

We speculate that when Microsoft bought that part of Nokia, somewhere in the process the Sync.com domain name went up for auction (which appeared to be owned by Nokia just prior to the spin off).

As a startup trying to get going with Sync.Us, rebranding to https://www.sync.com really helped us take off.

Thanks to whomever auctioned that off :-)

I lived next to a Nokia network engineer for several years. Lot's of activity in that space still.

Nokia's networking business was quite separate from the mobile phone business that got sold to Microsoft.

Its tire business as well.

And footwear company...

Seems Nokia read HN and have sorted out a rebrand to remove any confusion people have with the phone business: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/nokia-reveals-new-logo...

they are still a big player in the telco equipment space. you'll find their hardware and/or software in most tower cabinets in the world

> On Monday, the company, which employs more than 105,000 worldwide, announced plans to cut about 1,400 jobs in Sweden.

While Ericsson did not disclose which geography would be most affected, analysts had predicted that North America would likely be most affected and growing markets such as India the least.

The cost cutting will continue until profits improve.

Do you disagree with the described strategy? If you think a market is relatively saturated (as I assume the US is from a telecom equipment perspective, especially given growing suspicion of foreign suppliers), wouldn't you allocate your limited resources to markets that have room to grow?

I think the suspicion of foreign suppliers is probably to Ericsson’s benefit in the west.

It’s more anti-non-NATO rather than anti-foreign.

But if Ericsson drops all its US staff, I could see them getting lumped in with the likes of Huawei anyway.

It's actually anti-non-NAFTA, as can be seen in the inflation reduction act.

So the “Inflation Reduction Act” has clauses that restrict one’s choice of vendors???

Probably not if they end up joining NATO (whenever the west apeses the Turkish dictator).

Ericsson revenue in SEK:

March 2022: 55.06B

June 2022: 62.46B

Sept. 2022: 68.04B

Dec. 2022: 85.98B

Dec. 2022: 7% profit margin, 11.36B operating income, 1.6B net change in cash on hand, 50.32B cost of revenue

Beat revenue in four consecutive quarters, all while dealing with IPR agreements and DOJ provisions. Sales up YoY and full year.

"A dividend for 2022 of SEK 2.70 (2.50) per share will be proposed to the AGM by the Board of Directors."

https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-releases/2023/1/ericsson-r...

> 7% profit margin [in 2022]

A year ago they had 17.3% profit margin, that’s a massive drop that I imagine spurred this decision.

https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-releases/2022/1/ericsson-r...

Oh no, our mythical infinite growth is growing slightly less quickly.

Absolutely bananas thinking.

I mean I agree with you in principle but that doesn't change the fact that as a CEO you are in danger of losing your job if margins compress that much and you don't make a show of doing something about it. Keeping margins up is kind of important if you want to be able to invest in new products and markets and survive as a company into the next generation.

Edit: I was talking about the comment above me conflating wanting higher margins with belief in infinite economic growth. I wasn't making a statement about the morality of Ericsson layoffs nor do I have any insight on their financials. I was simply observing that margins seem to be a thing that investors care quite a bit about.

> if margins compress that much and you don't make a show of doing something about it.

Isn’t the layoff them showing they are doing something about their margin compression?

I truly don’t mean my comments to come across harsh. That’s not my intent and realize families will be harmed by jobless. But there’s not much a company can do to cut costs quickly to boost margins other than layoffs.

Yes, it's crazy, and yet this is how it's supposed to function. Boggles the mind. Solid healthy profits have little value, and companies are forced to think short term rather than long

I don't know about infinite, but Ericsson is in the networking space, and there is plenty of work remaining to be done in that space. In the US, cell service is pretty mediocre, and 5G is still rolling out in major cities. I still routinely find gaps in coverage, or find myself in a populated area with very slow coverage. And this is a developed country, not even speaking of many many countries around the world still building out their networking infrastructure. I suspect this is actually accelerating as many developing countries have experienced good growth in the last few decades.

There may come a time when we hit some kind of steady state, but we're definitely not close now.

As noted in my link, "primarily due to business mix change in Networks and previously announced charges for contract exits and portfolio adjustments in Cloud Software and Services".

If they took that hit and missed significantly on revenue, a layoff wouldn't be as unexpected. To take that hit and then beat on revenue, both quarterly and YoY, and then kick off an 8% layoff, is just corporations being corporations for the sake of it.

> To take that hit and then beat on revenue

Revenues don’t mean anything though.

I could generate huge revenues by selling $100 gift cards for 80 bucks. But I’ll have no profit to show for it.

If their profitability was cut in 1/2 in just 1-years time, it's actually irresponsible for management to not take actions to get costs/margins under control.

Ericsson's effort to have a presence in Silicon Valley has always seemed strange to me since they got so much cheaper engineers closer to their HQ.

I mean, they don't need VC money. Why be in SF.

A lot of related companies (Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks) are based in South Bay. If you want to hire anyone from those companies or do partnerships with them, you should probably have a bay area satellite office despite the costs.

You can have a sales office or whatever. Having a small RnD office not doing the grunt core stuff anyways won't impress anyone.

I had no idea Ericsson had over 100k employees. I did not expect them to be ~2.5x the headcount of Qualcomm.

They make the software that runs mobile networks and part of the hardware (as in radio towers, even chips in the past), various special purpose hardware used in the past is also still in use. They also operate these networks as a service to telecom providers. The goods and services they provide are spread pretty wide.

Yeah that surprised me as well. It would be interesting to get a ‘tech company ordered by headcount’ list but it would make me nervous the listing would result in some executive deciding they should layoff more people.

I would hope an executive would be smart enough to find out how to come across that list.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-number-o...

I didnt expect that Ericsson even had 8500 employees to lay off. Kind of disappeared from the radar after the mobile phone era. (Yes i know they still make equipment)

Ye well that is the difference between B2B and B2C for ya. I can name 5 brands of milk but name no milk farm.

Does manufacturing account for a large portion of those 100k+ employees? Ericsson is not a fabless semiconductor firm, after all. They need to produce things like enclosures and PCB's (perhaps that is done by 3rd parties).

Ex-Ericsson engineer here, I was at the company for 13 years. Regarding the size - lot of people don't realize because it hasn't been a front-facing company since the collapse of its phones business, but it really is invested in tech right across the board - from developing its own real-time operating systems to its own massive-core chipsets used in base stations, to its own ML platforms. Just the research arm of Ericsson is huge in itself, I think they have around 60 000 patents granted, and are doing everything from fundamental RF research, to quantum machine learning. Not to mention a huge managed services business that helps telecom operators run their networks.

Regarding the lay-offs - telecom industry is essentially a sinewave. The "good" period (e.g. from 5G prototype to complete network migration to 5G) lasts approximately 5 years. The way contracts are signed means that you sell X number of network nodes (base stations, core nodes, etc) and some kind of support contract to go with it. After that, there is nothing. Very different from public cloud providers where you pay as you go. Ericsson and most telecom vendors still haven't figured out how to monetize this.

I came here to say this. These layoffs seem to have more to do with the normal telecom deployment lifecycle than anything else.

If this was true then we would have seen similar layoffs between UMTS(3G) and LTE(4G) and between LTE and 5G. Is there any evidence of that? Also Telcos around the world are still rolling out 5G and much of the tech's promise of Edge Computing have not yet been deployed or realized.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ericsson-layoffs/ericsson...

From your link:

>"The company faces mounting competition from China’s Huawei and Finland’s Nokia as well as weak emerging markets and falling spending by telecoms operators with demand for next-generation 5G technology still years away."

The layoffs are attributed to three things:

1. Competition

2. A slump in investment in emerging markets.

3. Falling spending(it's not clear from the press relase if that was just spending for Ericsson's gear.)

Additionally there was no global Telecom industry slump in 2016. Just in the US alone it was something of a boom year with lots of activity. See:

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/strong-growth-potential-for-...

And Ericsson market cap is $20B while Qualcomm market cap is $138B. And Nokia is $26B.

I was honestly surprised to learn they were still in business.

Why? Ericsson has always been a back-end networking and telecommunication company.

Erlang was created, at Ericsson, for a telephony switch.

It's shuttered the consumer side entirely (Sony Ericsson was a joint venture, not a group), it's one of the lead developers in mobile telephony, as well as the lead IP holder in the domain.

In Europe also a large player in the broadcast space, though Red Bee Media (formerly Ericsson Broadcast and Media Services): BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Canal+, as well as Channel 4 and Channel 5's VOD. RBM is also a huge provider of closed captioning, signing, and audio description worldwide, by far the largest in europe for more than 15 years (after they acquired Mundovisión and Titelbild).

If the parent was typing the above message on a phone attached to their telecom network, there is a high probability their user and control plane traffic was going through Ericsson systems.

Does anyone at Ericsson still use Erlang? If so I hope these layoffs do not negatively impact internal use of Erlang at Ericsson. It’s a language built on some pretty nifty ideas.

Of course old networks are still operated and maintained. 5G is exclusively "cloud-native" (i.e. microservices on Kubernetes) and most common core components are written in Java, Go and Python. So while Erlang is still being used and ran, most new code is not written in Erlang, as far as I know.

This HN comment says the same, it's not used anymore:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18142526

That thread says the opposite at the end. The ban they were referring to was over a decade prior.

Ericsson has a dedicated team that maintains and actively improves Erlang with new features and capabilities.

This is very interesting thank you. I always said to myself if I was writing anything telecom-y I would use Erlang but seems its days are behind us. I wonder if it's just too expensive to hire and train people in it when everyone knows Go/Java/Python already, or if it's more the idea that other ecosystems have sprung up to replace it e.g. K8s.

Ericsson literally hires people full time to work on Erlang.

On a parallel note, when I was at Nokia Networks, the long-term plan was to replace everything that was using a mix of C++ and Perl for distributed computing in HP-UX with Java, leaving C++ only for the low level hardware stuff.

Not sure how much of it ended up happening, after all the layoffs in Germany a couple of years ago.

Erlang is still in very much in active use for parts of Packet Core 5G. Other parts of Packet Core are C++ and C.

and in RAN too.

Think about network functions that where these languages do not make sense; then you will find they are not used. You wouldn't write a packet processing router in any of those languages (aka UPF). High availability, fault tolerant applications for NAS and non-NAS signalling speaking to the gNodeB/UEs - same deal.

I've heard that they don't use Erlang at all except for test suites, and I've read rumors that it was mostly politics from C++ people who succeeded in making it so.

Erlang is used for implementing the AMF functionality in the 5G Core.

What you heard is completely and utterly incorrect information. It's used extensively across multiple products and business areas.

I'm glad to hear that. This was from an Ericsson employee for the record.

Did they, too, overhire to prepare for a mad tsunami of post-pandemic demand for base stations?

No, nm, they didn't. They are doing it just because.

It's getting pretty comical by now if there weren't people involved.

Is their business affected by the drop in demand that typically accompanies recessions? I am asking because I honestly have no idea; I don't know anyone who has bought anything from Ericsson in over a decade.

They are an exclusively business-to-business company and their customers are major telecoms. I would guess the whole telco market is not affected much generally, especially not one more link down the chain. I already have trouble believing people use mobile networks less in a recession (or pay for them less by a considerable degree) and telecoms mainly pay Ericsson for goods and services to provide a certain capacity, which I also have no reason to believe would go down.

> I don't know anyone who has bought anything from Ericsson in over a decade

In 2021, Ericsson held the largest % market share in radio access network equipment and software [1] (that's what your mobile phone speaks to over the air)

That means that you likely do know of companies that have purchased significant volumes of products from Ericsson, although the statistical probability of this fact deviates depending on what country you live in.

[1] https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/ericsson-b...

Let's stand together to support those impacted by Ericsson's layoffs. We must prioritize compassion and action to help those affected find new opportunities and rebuild their livelihoods.

Oh look 8%, what a shocker.

Companies are going to regret this in the next 5 years as baby boomers continue to retire and there's far fewer gen Z to replace them.

Why isn’t rehiring sufficient to avoid regret.

All those lay-offs, which are not really big in overall numbers and more a topic at places like HN because if the demographic hit, don't mean the people being layed off stop existing...

Why do you claim there are fewer gen-z to replace those who retire?

Many of my coworkers and peers are millennials, and I personally also know large swaths of gen Z folks who are extremely technical, more and more people are pushed into tech as a career choice these days - much more than they were in past generations. Statistically it seems likely we're going to see more technically proficient people in younger generations due to more numbers of people in that generation having greater exposure to tech.

Companies like Ericsson could have an issue with their tech not being the same tech that younger generations are learning, but I doubt that'll be a major problem in practice as people are eager to learn and rewrite things with newer exciting tech.

My natural reaction to that statement is that this is a subjective statement to say that one generation is more knowledgable than another. Those who are younger may tend to be more gung-ho, but given the lack of experience those who are younger have, more knowledgable may not be accurate. That said it might be that the perception is that a more gung-ho person is more knowledgable but perception and reality are not always the same.

I edit'd my comment (after I saw you say it appeared ageist); that's not what I intended and I can see how it came across that way (esp in the context of layoffs) - there are definitely going to be technically proficient people across all age ranges and I am firmly against ageism.

It'd be a mistake to think baby boomers are irreplaceable by younger generations though (what OP suggested.) I believe we will see more technically proficient people in younger generations statistically due to more people in that group being exposed to tech. Not that they will be better necessarily.

Not many of my peers in school were learning tech, for example, but a good majority of those I talk to now say their kids are learning to go into tech. This is in Arizona, with random people, Uber drivers, etc. so not exactly a tech hub where it'd be very expected.

Cool! I took down my initial ageist comment right after I posted it because I didn't want to be too harsh and get into an un-intended flame war over something that you may not have meant.

More people are going into tech as technology eats the world and people see that there are opportunities here. It is also becoming a required skill for a lot of trades such as working on cars, home automation systems, security systems, HVAC, appliance repair etc..

While more experienced people may be able to bring more value in many cases, often management does not see that and does the penny-wise, pound foolish thing. I have seen that happen a lot. Be it good, bad or indifferent, company owners are looking to make our skills more fungible so that they can drive those costs down. Also, hiring younger workers often translates into lower salaries. This is why no matter how irreplaceable people may feel they are, they are often not as irreplacable as they think they are.

I guess it depends upon what you mean.

If you're talking electrical and mechanical tech, I'm not so sure. If you're talking software, then yeah, the software industry has exploded over the past 20 years.

But I think that could be a problem rather than a boon: part of me wonders if non-software-engineering engineering is going to face huge problems in the future. Software salaries have really sucked the air out of the other industries, and software doesn't matter without amazing hardware to back it up.

I 1000% agree with you; both my parents were aerospace engineers and when they were going through college that was what everyone was pushed to choose as a career; nowadays it's tech (software) - so I see that problem very clearly.

(in my message above, "tech" refers to software tech, it's an overloaded term so I normally refer to electrical/mechanical engineering just as that)

Everyone was pushed into aerospace? Sounds like a small industry for everyone to be pushed into. Maybe it's a city with an aerospace company or something

> Why do you claim there are fewer gen-z to replace those who retire?

Math? While gen Z is larger in absolute numbers, baby boomers were a much larger overall percentage of the population at the time they were born. Thus, there is still a large bump in the population pyramid that is retiring en mass.

> Statistically it seems likely we're going to see more technically proficient people in younger generations due to more numbers of people in that generation having greater exposure to tech.

While I don't know what official statistics say, "being able to use an iPad" does not make one technically proficient. There have been a bunch of articles recently (some on the front page of HN) about how much of gen Z is completely unprepared for the technical workforce because they don't know how anything works under the covers. They don't know how to find files on a filesystem, they don't know how to debug computer issues, they don't know how to use spreadsheets, etc. They can of course learn to do this stuff, but the trend of dumbing down technology so it's a black box makes people less able to succeed technologically, not more.

I may have bitched as a kid to no end to figure out how to edit config.sys or autoexec.bat to run some game, but it did teach me skills about how to dig deeper when I hit a roadblock.

Yeah I have no idea how did OP came up with Gen Z being ubiquitous in highly technical roles like the ones people at Ericsson affected by the layoffs hold. Virtually all developer jobs today anywhere in the world are strictly limited to webdev.

But then we’re on HN, where Backend and DevOps is probably what are considered technical pinnacles.

Unfortunately we are shovelling so much in at the top of the stack these days, that while the foundations change much more slowly, there is just so much more to learn. And let's face it, low level or systems programming is just not as attractive and "shiny" as the latest web tech fad or creating a AI/crypto web startup, so I can see why the younger generations go for that instead of the foundational stuff, even if it's dissapointing.

Some of us old-timers are very happy digging around in the basement levels while the web stack grows ever upward.

Highly doubt that, automatization and bots are replacing most of the jobs on scary speeds

It's a catch 22. I feel like salaries skyrocket for the top end of people who caught the wave, are already senior programmers, while low level work gets farmed out to india or even if it's not - it's really hard to train junior developers without hands on face to face time like we had in offices.

I am currently training a junior dev. We only see each other every other week for a few hours. His motivation is all that matters imo. He is learning very fast

I have a jr developer right now and I find it hard to co-write code or do reviews sometimes compared to 'let me roll my chair over' type of situation.

Perhaps remote learning requires skill and attitude that prevent you from needing someone to frequently co-write code. I don't have much time to spare so I will only co-write code when the jr dev is literally stuck. The rest of the time I give general guidance and let him figure it out - " improve logging here, consume less resources here by doing xyz, improve readability, optionally use advanced pattern to help you out, etc ". I try to give an example of what I mean each time. Each time he cracks things he grows in confidence and motivation

They will hire in India or bring workers from India. You are being naive thinking gen Z will have any power to influence policies. 600$ for a spot with matress in a hallway to sleep and salary half of the locals, you have millions clamoring for that.

And more and more corporations would turn into dust with that kind of workforce. This is the fate of the west. Look at what happened to Intel, oracle, IBM etc which hired these H1B "coders" and middle management. I'm not complaining, just observing.

I don't think there is correlation between hiring cheaper and a corporation doing worse. The fact is these people are as smart as the rest if not smarter(they had fierce competition), definetely hardworking and motivated(make less, sleep on the floor and send the rest of the money back to family). It's just the great equalization and dissapearance of middle class in western countries.

Fierce competition does not mean something is good. There's fierce competition for bread that volunteers hand out of UNICEF trucks into a crowd of hungry, desolate people. Neither does that make the bread tasty, nor the winners "smarter".

>definetely hardworking and motivated.

Disagree. My experience, generally speaking, has been that they do not pay attention to detail, and are not that smart. Even though they might be motivated to keep the job, and they do make great corporate drones, but they do not come anywhere near what it takes to make successful product.

Do you mean Ericsson will hires Indians to work in Europe for cheap?

Ericsson too, maybe not in Europe but can be in Canada. Anyways looking at Ericson employees stats on Linkedin, most them of the are in India now(29K in India and 19K in Sweden).

Ericsson is a patent troll company.

This is unbelievably misinformed. This message will have passed through several Ericsson hardware parts between me writing it here and you reading it: radio base stations, hardware for fiber or copper, switches, back-end components...

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