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Layoff Timing
It feels weird to me to read about the tech sector having mass layoffs.
I first read about them months ago, where the general understanding (among sources I read) is the general contraction of the tech sector, perhaps back to sanity, perhaps back to par with other large companies. There even is a tracking website going back to the beginning of Corona: http://layoffs.fyi/ — some of the tracked companies are just startups that, like any company, can fail. But GoFundMe laid off 12% at the end of October, and you just need to keep scrolling to see more names you might know.
So why are we hearing about tech sector problems now? I knew about these hiring freezes and impending reviews MONTHS ago. Do we just have a perfect storm now that the media can blame it all on Elon Musk? Now the media can have headlines like “Meta follows Musk, lays off employees” so people can put blame on Musk?
Or am I a cynic and misreading the numbers?
Published in General
The tech sector is simply high-profile because to make meaningful cuts, they have to cut (presumably) well-educated professionals. Lots of other industries tighten their balance sheet with employees for whom the media has little or no sympathy. Therefore, no coverage. Especially since any coverage would be spun to reflect badly on the current administration.
So. A bevy of angst-filled articles on the demise of the tech sector.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/something-has-snapped-unexplained-23-million-jobs-gap-emerges-broken-payrolls-report
If there had been reports of hiring freezes and RIF’s they would have contributed to the construct of a non-transient slowdown in the economy at the same time there was experience of non-transient inflation. They’ve delayed any questions until the election.
We have talked about the impact on company growth and productivity of the many work from home, unsupervised more or less experienced college grads. (I do feel bad for the new hires who had no one to train them for 2+ years, nor get to know them as potentially valuable employees, nor take an interest in them. They’ve lost 2 +years of experience they could start to use about now.) There have been a lot of “projects” funded by the easy growth of the Trump years – projects not actually getting to production and/or products or services customers actually want to pay for. The government subsidies went to a lot of who knew what, since no one was actually in the office.
Wasn’t it a mistake for them to do this right before the election? Seems like a lot of those fired/laid-off people might just be inclined to vote for The Other Side.
Let’s hope!
I saw in that chart that the Twitter layoffs of 3700 amounted to 50%. Twitter thought they needed over 7,000 employees for some reason?!?!?!?
I don’t understand why they need more than 500.
There were massive tech layoffs when the Dot-Com bubble burst in 2000, as I recalled. Mind, in tech years 22 calendar years is more like 176 tech years, so it is unsurprising no one in tech remembers it.
My experience is no matter what industry, massive layoffs eventually occur. The only solution is to be capable of switching industries when you are the one hit.
Can you site more info? I don’t follow this sector but are there multiple factors? There seems to be more plants opening like the Intel plant in Ohio etc. Social media? I don’t consider that a tech sector but ok…….I’m not sold on Musk being the constant barometer of everything like so many do. In fact, beyond that he’s brilliant, I don’t trust him and anything he says, that there isn’t a plan behind his plans…….
Also, META should have a reduction. These social media sites are too big and have too much control.
I wonder how many Dem-supporting companies are waiting until after the mid-terms to announce their layoffs?
Lets bring in another million from India on H1B visas.
It’s not really all that weird; it is the third of fourth one I can remember. Tech sector layoffs are frequently “bigger” (as in more people or a higher fraction) because startups flush with investor cash hire people quickly to try and deliver growth, and effectively grow a bubble. They then rinse and repeat until the bubble bursts. Twitter and Facebook are the biggest examples of this, but it is the pattern at many startups.
Facebook apparently has a big layoff coming. Google has been hinting. Microsoft, Apple and Oracle are more mature, so recent/coming layoffs there have been smaller and more targeted.
Are companies waiting until after the election? Perhaps. If so, I think they are waiting to see the results before deciding on a path.
The lay offs is basically just the companies taking power back from the employee that the employee got during the pandemic. This is all about killing off WFH or remote work and bringing people back into the office to be under the man’s thumb. Have to generate worker fear and terror to get the best out of them. Elon Musk is leading the way and the other’s are tossing in to let him take the heat.
You can see the force the worker back into the office and turn them back into wage slaves everywhere. Like here
https://www.inc.com/kelly-main/google-simple-strategy-increase-productivity.html
You make it sound like a bad thing.
Don’t know where I got this link, might have been R>. Regardless, it’s appropriate.
https://compactmag.com/article/the-email-caste-s-last-stand
It advances the idea that the Techs aren’t laying off productive people, but rather the persuasives that accumulate around anything new and successful. If true, it’s a very welcome development.
You’ll know things are serious when the layoffs include senior executives from HR and the affiliated salary sinks.
Women and Minorities Hardest Hit?
Collateral damage.
Those people can stay where they are in India and Big Tech firms will now be glad to employ them. What I have been reading is that once people started working from home, the Big Companies started to re-evaluate the idea of having physical bodies sitting in expensive real estate.
New York City now has massive amounts of prime office space sitting empty.
If workers do not need to come into the office, then it makes cents for the Big Companies to simply hire offshore.
United Health Care has replaced the wonderful warm, middle aged people who gave the help you needed with young people in the Philippines. Because the company doesn’t trust their abilities to handle several problems, everything has been “stream lined.” It is almost so bad that one worker takes your first name, and then a second person in a different section of customer “care” takes your surname.
Prior to this change, it was possible to call and get 4 or 5 problems handled by one person in ten minutes and now it takes 45. Because at least two different people have to handle it. The customer also decides not to press it and get problem 4 or 5 handled as it will take another half hour to get the extra problems handled.
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Actually:
I don’t know if they were doing nothing worthwhile, or whether the roles will come back via subcontractor – in India or elsewhere.
I hate the deliberate dumbofication of this kind of job. It may make sense on paper but it hardly ever does in real life.
All that matter is if they can make money. Customer satisfaction does not.
Customer satisfaction is very important to repeat business.
What repeat business? Many companies are monopolies or cartels. Especially with medicine. Example. In my area if you need a urologist then there is only one place to go. Nobody else is in the business, they have run all the competition out. So you go to them and be satisfied. More and more of these situations arise as economics, politics, legalities work.
Aside from the obvious numbers manipulation, and anecdotally, we’ve been hiring for telecommunications workers and project managers, business analysts, in the last year, and are getting mostly garbage resumes in. Out of 20 or so resumes, only 5 candidates for a PM were worth looking at, and I mean just looking at. The rest were the best we got in, but were completely unqualified – in some cases, not at all qualified.
It wasn’t like this 3 years ago, for whatever that’s worth. If you’re looking for work, there seems to be no end to the opportunities, and I get hit up on LinkedIn 2-3 times a week now for work, which is very different from a year ago. Note that much of the work is contract, not permanent, but that’s also typical for project manager work.
Again, all anecdotal, and I don’t know what it means. Something has shifted, certainly, not just in the tech sector, and much of it is related to the pandemic and working from home. Our company is scrambling to end office space leases and selling real estate off, to consolidate, and embrace a hybrid work model (part time in the office in a temporary space, part time at home).
If you’re trying to build project teams, doing it remotely is probably the worst way to do it. Yet here we are.
That’s small potatoes. Meta laid off 11,000 today — and that was only 13% of their workforce, apparently.
That’s what I expected more of them to do, wait until after the election.
I wonder if any of the 11,000 would have voted differently yesterday, if they’d known.
My feeling is that a lot of the tech companies were so profitable for so long, that they got bloated with poor investments in projects that would never pay off. Now that interest rates are high, and stock market way down they are having to reduce costs because their revenues are not increasing. Google is terrifically profitable due to search and loses money on everything else it does. Ad revenue for search is not growing near as fast anymore because Google has captured 70% of the market.