Hacker News Reader

So far, probably 80% of these roles have been non-engineering (wrt to all tech layoffs, not Amazon specifically).

So these were probably just non-engineering people from other parts of the economy.

Do you have hard data to back the 80%?

Companies have been hand-wringing about the tech labor shortage for the last 10 years. People went to school and got degrees in a job sector they thought would be pretty safe. Supply/demand.

Just one data point, but I recently talked to a guy that bounces between being a mortgage broker and a tech worker. When the housing business is booming he switches to mortgage work, then when that slows down he jumps back into technology. I think he said he was in some kind of pre-sales role in tech.

Now that they're both slow at the same time, I'm not sure what he's planning.

Silicon Valley cloud and SaaS applications have been devouring an entire ecosystem of in-house and on-prem IT, small line-of-business software vendors, etc.

Attrition plays a role too, if you hire expecting 20% attrition and attrition comes in at 5% you have more employees than you budgeted.