Ask HN: Will there be more layoffs in 2024? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Will there be more layoffs in 2024?

I assume any small companies that were on the fence will no start doing more as it's easier to pull off in an environment where other companies are doing layoffs. Also a lot of smaller company outlooks are trending downward which until they hit bottom will likely involve more layoffs.

Layoffs happen somewhere every year, even in amazing economies (and many have already been announced this year). Do you mean are we going to have a repeat of 2023, with a massive amount of tech layoffs? I don't know, I'd assume we wouldn't, but so far the year isn't off to a great start on that front, seeing quite a few tech companies announcing more layoffs, so I'm not sure.

There will definitely be some as things take time to propagate, but my estimate would be a reversal in the end of 2024 when feds are going to lower interest rates. This coupled with the AI hypetrain is going to drive competition to get established in the space.

"_when_ feds are going to lower interest rates" is awfully presumptuous, don't you think?

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/fed-cut-q2-probably-june-...

https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates/cme-fedwatch...

"The minutes of the December meeting suggest that there has not been an elaborate discussion of the cutting cycle yet"

Economists "expect" a rate cut in June, but this is not to be confused with the FOMC actually declaring intent for a rate cut.

If interest rates remain high and capital remains expensive, then yes.

The tech job world of the last 2 decades was riding 2 tsunamis, the explosion of the internet and 0% interest rates. The last 2 years have put the brakes on both of those fronts. In the developed world the market has become effectively fully saturated with web and app development, simultaneously the ability to borrow money is no longer effectively free.

Both of those changes have halted risky growth opportunities.

tldr; layoffs will continue until money is free again or a new and highly lucrative unsettled frontier is found

Will companies offshore some of that expensive labor then? or will it just not be replaced?

I think most companies that try offshoring dev work (and there have been many) reverse course fairly quickly, for a variety of reasons. However, there were a lot of devs being paid to do things that just didn't need doing, either because it was 10 companies trying to do the same thing, or because it was trying to look good for an IPO rather than solving someone's real problem.

There is still lots of real, useful programming work out there to do, but it will take some time for the industry to pivot back towards working on real problems.

If you look at the stats for last year, it seems like an exponential decay: https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/11/tech-layoffs-2023-list/

Likely we'll see half in the next two months, then a quarter, and less.

Companies that are wasting their capital will do layoffs. That includes people working at profitable companies who happen to be working on projects that either don’t make sense or are not financially viable.

Most of my friends who got laid off said they were working on these types of projects, so obviously anecdotal. I was curious so I asked them.

Yep, as much as everyone wants to assume that everyone in the C-Suite is an idiot - I am quite certain they also know that a lot of the work that is being done in big companies, doesn't actually need to be done - but when times are good, those projects get funded anyway.

Advice to younger folks, try to get on a project in your company that is critical to its success if you are worried about job stability - still not a guarantee, but better than being on some VP's vanity project that doesn't move the needle for the company at all and is likely to get shutdown on a whim.

When governments are paying to keep wars running outside their borders, the impact will come on the economy and affect the buying power of end customers. If we see how wars are expanding, 2024 seems difficult, I hope this is a wrong analogy.

You can look at stats for spending on Ukraine and compare it to overall total spending. The percentages are very small.

More than half of the budget goes to defense and military

Source: https://www.nationalpriorities.org/analysis/2023/warfare-sta...

Spending on Ukraine is a rounding error compared to overall defense spending: https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/russia-ukraine/ "For context, the $24B the U.S. has spent on security assistance to Ukraine amounts to less than three percent of last year’s defense budget." ...and most of that money never actually left the country.

yes, but we should also see hiring pick up (and we have some). I expect lots of shuffling around in 2024, but less of the 2023 "winter" we had.

For instance, I know multiple teams at my FAANG that have open positions, though there is a backlog of both internal and external candidates.

Yes, the party is over. Expect to see startups who haven't raised money in 2+ years to completely shut down.

Or acquired by all these tech giants who are making record profits. It sounds like quite a sale season for them.

Yes.

Of course. We haven't even finished January yet.

Yes.

See https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24049050/microsoft-activi... for the latest example.

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