Tech layoffs highest since dot-com crash
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I would not be surprised if we later learn there's been a Signal chatroom with a cabal of Fortune 500[1] board members with a conversation that's going like this:
> Hey folks, staffing is getting expensive. Competing for staff is hurting us all. What do you say we all coordinate and put our projects on ice for a while, do major layoffs for 18 months or so, and push wages back down to 2014 levels?
(+237 thumbs up reactions)
Simultaneously, Twitter dumping a bunch of employees put downward pressure on wages (for certain roles), which made the math even more compelling for companies that were on the fence. It became clear that you could probably lay off people now and then fill new roles (in strategic departments) with lower comp.
Once it was apparent that tons of companies were doing RIFs, the reputational hit of doing a RIF was greatly diminished.
Boards felt pressure from shareholders, and one domino fell after another.
Tesla isnt "performing" bad, and its price has roughly nil to do with how the company is doing. It's share price got insanely overvalued, and it corrected.
Tesla is up 767% in the last 5 years, almost 10x the SP500.
And Twitter has been written down over 70% since the acquisition. My point is just that the layoffs arguably did nothing to help, and may have hurt their ability to execute and thus cost them some big opportunities. "They didn't completely implode" isn't "success," any more than becoming blind and paraplegic by choice is "success" because you're still alive.
See https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-s...
How many of the Fortune 500 have had "tech layoffs". 237 or some other number.
Most of these layoffs seem to be dominated by "tech adjacent" roles ... that bloated "engineering" when there was lots of easy money.
Companies really don't want more staff at these salaries if they are seen as a cost center in the billions each year, Twitter, Meta, Snap, Coinbase, Robinhood, etc are great examples that showed this in the past.
They really are screaming for a staff shortage of people who want to accept their very low-ball offers.
A decade ago, the amount of VC capital contributed to such inflated salaries as the standard to lure people working at banks, wall st, hedge funds or older established tech companies.
As soon as those places started to lose staff to startups, they decided to raise their salaries and comp packages to discourage them from leaving, and those companines can afford to do such raises or bonuses. Startups? Not so much, unless they are immensely profitable.
> Hey folks, staffing is getting expensive. Competing for staff is hurting us all. What do you say we all coordinate and put our projects on ice for a while, do major layoffs for 18 months or so, and push wages back down to 2014 levels?
...and off shore the laid off staff and hire developers in cheaper countries as a skeleton crew to keep costs down and beat Wall St. expectations.
"Apple, Google, others settle antipoaching lawsuit for $415 million" - https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
We're a small B2B company and have been struggling hard to hire new developers for years, running a deficit of 2-3 devs for last 5+ years. Within last few months we've suddenly gotten multiple candidates and now find we have to pick and choose.
Really didn't expect it to affect us that much and so suddenly here in Norway.
> During five weeks of job hunting, Croisant said she applied to 48 openings and landed two interviews. She finally opted to accept a lower-level data analyst role and a roughly $3,000 reduction in her base pay to take a contract role starting next month at a financial technology company.
> “This was an absolutely terrifying experience for me, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever truly feel secure in a job again,” Croisant said. “But I’m still one of the lucky ones in the end. I have friends who’ve been looking for months and still haven’t found anything.”
I’ve been applying for 2 years and landed maybe 5 interviews, none of which offered me a job. Two friends recommended me for jobs and I couldn't even get phone calls screenings.
Note: I am a white male.
The committee wants a racial minority, LQBTQIA+, etc. The best white males can do is claim to be neurodivergent. That one lets them get passed the filters. But I’ve been part of discussions where the committee explicitly said they were disappointed the best candidate didn’t help with diversity and thus we passed.
Principles come at the expense of your salary sometimes, and sticking to your principles isn’t pragmatic if you can’t effect greater change.
We also have MRGs - Mozillian Resource Groups - where you can only join if you’re black, or gay, or <insert group>. That’s pretty blatantly illegal, too. Doesn’t stop it from happening.
> Principles come at the expense of your salary sometimes, and sticking to your principles isn’t pragmatic if you can’t effect greater change.
It’s not about having moral qualms or not. The company doesn’t want to change, at least not on its own. So if the ship is sinking, yeah I’ll keep my few hundred K + benies on its way down.
If anything the most change I can make is to keep working here and exposing all of the BS. Maybe enough of an uproar from the users will force them to change. Maybe if enough people who use FF see this and stop using it, they’ll be forced to change? It’s funny, we have an internal slack channel (#cccc to prove I work here) for dealing with external comms. Those in charge know a lot of our users are on HN, but they refer to people on this site as morons and it’s part of the playbook to avoid HN. Some are trying to change the opinion of HN internally.
I can’t tell you what will come of my posting here but in the meantime I’m going to keep rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
But how do you avoid hiring a non-diverse person? What if the hiring manager likes them? Simple, just don’t even give them a screening at all. “Not a culture fit”
A decade ago many startups could get away with it for years, now VCs are demanding to cut back staff and tighten up the purse.
A reminder that the cheap money era is over.
I haven't looked deeply into the data myself but it seems worth keeping in mind as context.
The dot-com crash was brutal. Brighter days followed.
BUT, performance goes through boom and bust cycles. It is not unique to the tech industry. Hence the ant saves during times of plenty.
New things will pop up and current things will pick up as well. It is cyclic.
The dotcom crash, 9/11, 2008, covid, and that's just since 2000. So when I read that now it is really over I can't help but chuckle a little bit.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
A big part of that was inflation was bottled up by basically outsourcing manufacturing to low labor cost China, but that effect is declining for a variety of reasons.
Inflation has been stubborn and even with higher rates the economy is roaring, so higher rates may persist and be a drag on tech employment.
Rates were the same or higher during the dotcom boom. I don't think they impact VC that much and companies are still getting massive funding rounds.
You end up needing to make calls to the AI a tremendous amount compared to when you query it yourself and do work in between responses.
If single shot results improve dramatically then some glue and scaffolding might be able to be removed. I think that’s one thing we won’t see particularly fast improvements on in spaces like software engineering, though.
Of course despite leaning on compute more than people think, it’s probably still orders of magnitude cheaper than a developer. But what’s the quality like? Devin still only succeeds less than 15% of the time. Reaching even 25% without significantly increasing compute and complexity is probably still quite far off, even with the steady advances we’ve been seeing.
I also wonder if the recent layoffs have affected the market for childcare. I definitely know some tech folks who are at home with their kids now.
Perhaps that’s because we live in SV, where housing is expensive, but I’d again assert that “most” daycares do not cost more than the rent/mortgage payments of the families that go there.
Our base rate (in Menlo Park) was around $1,500/mo, but if you added extra hours (past 1 or 2p) then it was more. Presumably someone who is laid off and wants to hold their spot would stick to the minimum hours both for cost reasons and so they could spend more time with their baby/kid.
Out of curiosity, what do mortgages cost for families who attend these daycares?
I do, however, always live below my means, save, and invest. I have never saved less than 30% of my salary. You have to do this long term, meaning 15 to 20 years+. Many people don't have the temperament to do this.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-...
I have to wonder if that survey was taken during the government shutdown when even was furloughed??
Why are you bringing up non-tech companies in this thread?
How about Congress bans new H1Bs for tech companies for a few years until the market settles?
It’s different than industrialization.
The definition of AGI is - do what humans do, but better.
This will only exacerbate over time.