What's with all the tech layoffs?
Every day there’s more big job cuts at tech and games companies. I’ve not seen anything explaining why they all seam to be at once like this. Is it coincidence or is there something driving all the job cuts?
It's interest rates.
Loans are more expensive, but critically, so are eggs.
Tech workers like eggs, and see no reason to buy fewer, so they're asking for more money, unionizing, or hopping jobs to increase their salaries.
Notice how the big players are releasing press releases each layoff? No attempt at secrecy. No payouts to NDA the laid off employees. It's an intimidation tactic.
It's working at the moment, but tech workers get over their job change discomfort fast when there's a 100% raise on the table. The market rate vs curent pay gap just creates pressure to change jobs until they do, even if they're scared.
And the shareholders are all fucked.
Every tech layoff is a lottery ticket toward a company ending event. And then every employee who leaves because they realize the company is incapable of loyalty. Then every worker who leaves because their suppressed wages aren't keeping up with their expenses or hobbies. Another chance to end the company. Nobody knows which perl script is the lynchpin of their company, or which random person will leave with all knowledge of it.
The CEOs are positively aggressively collecting chances to bankrupt their shareholders.
But the CEO will get a nice payout next quarter. So that's nice.
Every tech layoff is a lottery ticket toward a company ending event. And then every employee who leaves because they realize the company is incapable of loyalty. Then every worker who leaves because their suppressed wages aren’t keeping up with their expenses or hobbies. Another chance to end the company. Nobody knows which perl script is the lynchpin of their company, or which random person will leave with all knowledge of it.
Plus, as this happens the first/second/third time to new employees, they lose any sense of company-loyalty they might have had at their first job. The next time anything goes wrong, these people are already writing applications, and then quitting the moment they get an offer somewhere.
This behavior by company trains people to associate fuck all with their current job. Which is a good attitude as a worker, but usually not something a company would have wanted, historically. A privately held company would usually want to aim for high worker loyalty, allowing them to endure bad market times without immediately shedding most of their workforce.
Modern shareholders+C-suites behavior reinforces this, however. Everything goes in the name of saving the quarterly report and making it look good and paying out your own bonuses.
There are laws around how layoffs have to be communicated. Secret layoffs at large companies aren't a thing.
NDA's occur at the start of employment. When someone is laid off, there is typically a severance that includes a separation agreement, these may have an NDA clause.
The rest of this I agree with. This is being pushed by the shareholders. The scare tactic is an added bonus.
Unionize.
Secret layoffs at large companies aren't a thing.
Yeah. They aren't supposed to be a thing.
I've seen periods when a bunch of colleagues used to work for XYZ, and then didn't, and were real quiet about why they left, and "didn't have any hard feelings". (And remodeled the bathroom the same month they stopped working at XYZ.) So I assumed they got an illegal NDA and a fat goodbye bonus to keep them from questioning it.
I guess I'm technically just making assumptions as deeply cynical person.
Edit: and I imagine the lawyers involved set the whole thing up so it's technically not a secret layoff, by strict legal standards. Smelled like one, though. :)
Edit 2: Could also just have been a company below some legal size cut-off, I suppose.
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates in order to cause layoffs. The capitalist class wanted to enlarge the reserve army of labor so that workers would be too worried about losing their jobs to demand raises.
'You Are Gambling With People's Lives': Warren Rips Powell Over Job-Killing Rate Hikes
This is a thing that sounds like some crazy uncle bullshit but it is actually completely true and non-controversial.
The scariest thing to a central banker when it comes to inflation is that wages might start to go up. When that happens the inflations is basically permanent.
People need to understand that the Federal Reserve is the cartel of the US private banks, and that they have captured the US Treasury as well, which is the US sovereign fiat money printer. Just look at the history of people in executive positions at the Treasury and the Fed. It’s a revolving door between those positions and the executive positions at major US banks and corporations.
I agree this has got to be the root reason. They are scared.
Which is ironic because one of the Fed's chartered purposes is to maximize employment. I guess maximizing profits is more important, even though it's not on the list.
Yup. From an article I linked to in another comment:
The Federal Reserve Board’s ostensible policy aim is to manage the money supply and bank credit in a way that maintains price stability. That usually means fighting inflation, which is blamed entirely on “too much employment,” euphemized as “too much money.” In Congress’s more progressive days, the Fed was charged with a second objective: to promote full employment. The problem is that full employment is supposed to be inflationary – and the way to fight inflation is to reduce employment, which is viewed simplistically as being determined by the supply of credit.
So in practice, one of the Fed’s two directives has to give. And hardly by surprise, the “full employment” aim is thrown overboard – if indeed it ever was taken seriously by the Fed’s managers.
I actually think it’s just bandwagoning by a bunch of cowards.
We saw this same phenomenon early last year too: Facebook laid off a bunch of employees, then Apple announced the same, then Microsoft, then Google, then Salesforce, then the infamous Twitter layoffs.
I think big tech is so sensitive to negative press that they all just wait and lay off folks at the same time so no single company takes all the bad press.
It doesn’t even have to be Illuminati-level coordination, either. All it takes is for some exec at Tech Company B to see that Tech Company A is firing people. Then Tech Company B decides to clean house too. The cascade is just a bunch of morons deciding to hop on the “let’s fuck over our employees to help our balance sheet” train.
Apple did not announce any layoffs last year. It's been news worthy because some many of the other tech companies have had multiple rounds
Definitely agree it's not an Illuminati cabal meeting in hoods and masks.
But it's not not that either - there's lots of overlap on boards of directors and VCs invested in these companies. They're in the same circles and probably play golf together. Or, they hang out on the tarmac before their Davos keynotes on saving the world.
It's more devious than that. If company A lays off 1000 people due to "legitimate" reasons (e.g. twitter generally doing poorly), that's 1000 people looking for new jobs. Company B, C, and D can then take that as an opportunity to lay off 1000 people each that aren't immediately vital to the success of the company. Company A might not have the funds or desire to rehire right away, but the other three will slowly start building back up. You end up with 4000 people competing for 100 open positions. Many may not be willing to accept a pay cut, but some percentage will, and gradually the rest will be slowly starved down to accepting less pay.
Software engineering is notoriously a high paid career path, and executives at these companies hate that, so any opportunity they get to suppress wages, they'll jump on. Especially if you know every other big company is doing it to, so they won't be able to turn that into an advantage against you
Employees aren't afraid anymore so companies are trying to reinstate fear.
Yes, it is a concerted effort to create a glut. This is like the wga strike, they want to starve you a little so you'll come back begging for a job before you lose your home.
They know the next 20 year will be a shortage of labour and stagflation. They're just trying to start this lean period with the upper hand.
It's an easy win for the balance sheet. Their products are still sellable, the services should be more or less unaffected (for the next few quarters), so they'll continue to get the same revenue. But their costs just decreased, so they look more profitable.
It looks good on quarterly calls. It's a good way to juice a stock.
Short-term profits in exchange for long-term damage!
Tech is hard, leaders aren’t always technical. AI is great at bullshitting, and it’s swooned many CEOs into thinking it will 10x (make them 10x more efficient than they previously were) existing employees / replace the need for programmers. Lots of leaders just look to what other leaders at companies are doing - some see what elon does at twitter as proof that downsizing drastically won’t kill your company.
Programming is like editing a book with many chapters. New developers need time to learn the story line of the book before they can begin editing anything. If the book has been around and edited continuously for over a decade, it’s going to take some time for those developers to understand the book well enough to start making meaningful contributions. Lots of these tech companies have multiple books each with many chapters, and one thing leadership either doesn’t realize or doesn’t seem to factor into the equation is that maintaining these books and all their story arcs and character development gets harder and harder over time. Truly in the tech industry, it’s more expensive to train a new hire than it is to promote an existing hire.
But again, leaders are listening to folks like elon musk…
Lots of tech companies saw huge growth during covid thanks to everyone having extra money to spend (see crypto and NFTs if you want clear examples that we just had too much laying around).
Many of these companies then saw their revenue and userbase increase month-after-month and thought the growth was going to continue forever (or, more cynically, they knew it was going to crash but acted like it was going to continue). This led to a bunch of hires to "drive growth."
But obviously, pandemic spending habits have mostly stopped, and the money faucet is being turned off. Companies can't afford all the workers they hired, so they're "let go due to market downturns."
TL;DR Companies either thought they were going to have unrealistic growth and made dumb hiring decisions, or knew the growth was going to end and thus made cruel hiring decisions.
The correction I would make is that they can afford the workers. But the leadership needs to continue the growth. All they have left is to cut expenses, and the easiest way to do that is layoffs.
Add something about the federal funds rate exceeding 2.5% for the first time since 2008 and you’re on the right track. I think interest rates affect startups more than Google so bigger tech firms were hoarding talent to prevent new competitors from having those workers.
I think interest rates affect startups more than Google so bigger tech firms
Definitely. Google has lots of cash already, whereas startups are often in need of more money.
The other thing that's happened recently is that businesses used to be able to write off (deduct in their tax return) all their R&D expenses in the year they were incurred, whereas now they need to be amortized over five years. This has a huge impact to startups because a lot of their initial work is R&D, and now they have much larger tax bills than they used to have. https://www.axios.com/2024/01/20/taxes-irs-startups-section174
Many people got hired during Covid.
Grow isn't as expected, so now they are firing again.
But on the bright side, most of those companies still employ more people than pre-covid.
A company hiring 19000 people isn't going to get as many clicks as a company firing 1900 people.
Overhiring during covid is definitely a major part of it, combined with a slight investment bubble bursting
Yeah, here in Germany, workers have stronger protections, laying them off isn't as easy, and I feel like the layoff waves have largely not occurred here, because companies didn't hire so much during the pandemic.
Another factor was the PPP and other "totally not bailouts" that were part of the COVID relief spending.
Of the roughly $800 billion dollars from PPP which was provided as uncollateralized, low-interest loans 66-77% went directly to companies and ~92% of those loans were completely forgiven.. In other words an ~5-600M bailout predicated on keeping positions open long enough to maintain plausible deniability that is what the goal was.
Late stage capitalism
Finally. Thanks.
One factor I haven't seen mentioned is that because of rising interest rates, tech companies have had to shift from being focused on growth to actually turning a profit. Because of this, companies are having to shed employees because they over hired in anticipation of that continued growth. People are expensive so that's an "easy" way to try to get the line closer to positive.
This is kind of a rough overview and I'm by no means an expert on economics. Just someone who works in tech and so has been following things closely.
Michael Hudson, Jun. 2022: The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages
To Wall Street and its backers, the solution to any price inflation is to reduce wages and public social spending. The orthodox way to do this is to push the economy into recession in order to reduce hiring. Rising unemployment will oblige labor to compete for jobs that pay less and less as the economy slows.
It also takes time to realize the costs of shedding workforce, and by then you might have a different CEO. As long as it's next quarter, it's fine.
This plus the changes to section 174 meaning R&D costs have to be written off over five years instead of all in the year they're incurred. That's hurting startups a lot and many have had to switch from building new stuff to licensing/selling their existing stuff, and firing some expensive engineers/developers, to be able to afford to stay open. https://www.axios.com/2024/01/20/taxes-irs-startups-section174
Overinvestment and strong labor demand led to very high salaries. Investors hate high salaries. Firing people they can replace at a discount now that supply is increasing
It's this.
With inflation, everyone deserves a higher salary. And programmers are able to command it.
CEOs hate this, so they're playing chicken.
They'll all get fired and pull their golden parachute in the next three years, when the shit hits the fan because they decided they could get by without XYZ critical skill.
Then they'll go to the next place and evangelize about how "you've got to invest in talent".
And soon they'll be surprised the employees are less and less loyal and blame it on the new generations.
Okayokayokay, this isn't the point, I know... but those are some really shitty, ill-fitting suits. They look like crap.
I'm assuming they were provided by the photography company taking the stock photos
Actually... I see your point.
Are they made of leather, or just.... super fake looking low quality fabric?
The latter, probably, given that they look identical. At first I thought: "AI", but the fingers are pretty good. I think they're just generic prop suits.
Tailoring makes or breaks a suit. They don't tailor suits for stock photos.
Greed. They are making more profit than ever
Sometimes I like to think of the economy as a small village where people directly goods with each other. The invention of money means you can make a living off of selling to just one person and still have something to offer the farmer, but for this thought experiment this I want to focus on the actual, real, goods and services of the economy.
So imagine a small village. You have the farmer who grows food. You have the blacksmith who builds car parts, and the mechanic that builds cars and tractors. And you also have the village fool who makes people laugh in exchange for tips. The mechanic gives tractors to the farmers in exchange for food, and gives some of that food to the mechanic in exchange for parts. When any of them need a laugh they'll give something to the fool to hear a joke. And you have your other industries, etc. One day a new person comes to town, who will represent the new tech industry. They realize that they can build a machine that tells the farmer the best days to plant and harvest which will help the farmer grow more food. The farmer happily accepts, paying the tech person some food in exchange. Similarly they're able to help optimize the other industries, and with the value they're providing and them being in short demand they're able to get great wages.
With their prosperity, other tech people start coming to the village and helping the other industries get more efficient. Most of the concrete efficiencies are optimized, so they start working on more abstract ones. Someone builds an app to help the villagefolk find someone to trade with ("I have 2 gears but I need 3 loaves" gets matched with "I have 2 wheat bushels and need 2 gears" which gets matched with "I have 3 loaves and need 2 wheat bushels"), in exchange getting a small cut of those resources, and a larger cut if someone pays for preferential matching (advertising). Other tech people find work helping the other tech people at their jobs (IDEs, libraries, issue trackers, etc.) And other tech people build animatronic village fools to entertain the village themselves (video games).
More tech people come as they've heard of how much they can earn at this village. Eventually they start having some trouble finding work to do, everything seems optimized. Some of the wealthy members of the town (let's say the farmer of the biggest field) says to many of these tech people that they'll pay them food in exchange that the farmer gets a portion of whatever the tech person ends up earning with what they build (low interest rates). With all the good ideas used up, the projects these tech people are working on aren't working well (crypto) or are duplicates of already existing tools (how many social media apps do we need, etc.). Still though, the farmer is giving them a lot of food so yet more tech people come to the village, and many of the children of the village (like the farmer's son) are becoming tech workers too.
Eventually, after a bad crop season (maybe because the farmer's son didn't help harvest), the farmer is short on food and stops lending out food to these tech workers. They try to go around to the other villagefolk but most have already been optimized. The tools that optimized life are already built and the required tech people for maintenance is a lot less than those needed to build it, and the number of truly new opportunities to help new industries isn't enough to provide work to all the tech people.
Tech people earned their crazy salaries when they were helping migrate the non-digital world to the digital world. There were so many obvious opportunities for efficiencies and not enough tech people to go around. 'Spreadsheet' calculations literally used to be a day-long affair with a team of people - of course a business would pay anything to a tech person to automate that. Now that times the whole economy.
These obvious efficiencies are finite but we treated them as infinite and kept training new tech workers. Low interest rates helped keep us employed for longer than we should have as we were paid to work on bad products in the hope that maybe there'd be a diamond in the rough and yet we STILL kept training new workers. Meanwhile other careers that provide more concrete value, like mechanics & HVAC professionals, have had a labour shortage as Tech attracted so many young people to itself. This eventually led to persistent inflation which then ended low interest rates. With higher interest rates a lot of speculative tech can't get funding; Tech is only getting paid for the actual new value it can provide today, which is way less than it used to be.
ChatGPT has been quoted as a cause in at least one of the layoffs. The tech industry is specially positioned to be quickly affected by AI, but AI is going to impact 80% of the jobs on the planet within the next 8 years. Our world is about to experience a massive change to the way things are run. We can try to prepare, but it's going to change in ways previously unimaginable.
The chatbot that's wrong 50% of the time? That's hard to believe.
You're doing yourself a big disservice if you limit your understanding of AI to what you read from the opinions of Lemmings. It is incredibly powerful, and every major corporation has large investments in AI integration.
It doesn't need to be right to make money, often more money than companies get by paying people to do a job properly.
I mean, I can imagine it. It's the industrial revolution all over again but Cyberpunk style.
It's Q1. Companies always push hard for Q1 profits above all else. There's usually hiring freezes and cuts to maximize profits, come Q2, they'll hire a bunch of people and the cycle will continue.
Maximizing shareholder's profits, as St. Friedman commanded.
It's an election year in the midst of an onsetting recession, so shareholders want to consolidate. I think on top of that models are being sold as something that can replace certain task forces - normally there would be rehires, and there still will be but I think it will be after its seen that they aren't ideal replacements.
It's likely the election won't take place until next year.
Consolidations, changing business direction, lack of funds and projects, etc.
Big companies are inefficient at monitoring themselves and can have a lot of employees that aren't contributing to the company's health... it'd be nice if those were the folks laid off but it can also be difficult to determine who is valuable and who isn't so usually the cuts try and target low performers but metrics are used that cut a lot of high performers... then you're still in the hole and try more cuts.
This continues (obviously never affecting upper management) until the company collapses or you get lucky as hell.
It can't be a coincidence that this is happening as AI technology is getting better at what these fired people do at work
Edit: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tech-layoffs-artificial-intelligence-ai-chatgpt/
A few things happened pretty quickly.
During the pandemic, tech profits soared which led to massive hiring sprees. For all the press about layoffs at the big guys, I think most still have more workers than they did pre-pandemic.
Interests rates soared. Before the pandemic interest rates were ludicrously low, in other words it cost almost nothing to borrow money. This made it easier to spend on long term or unclear projects where the hope seemed to be "get enough users, then you can monetize." Once interest rates rose, those became incredibly expensive projects, so funding is now much more scarce. Companies are pulling back on bigger projects or, like reddit, trying to monetize them faster. Startups are also finding it harder, so fewer jobs.
And of course, AI. No one is quite sure how much that'll change the game but some folks think most programmers will be replaceable, or at least 1 programmer will be able to do the work of several. So, rather than hire and go through everything severance etc might entail, I think a lot of companies are taking a wait and see approach and thus not hiring.
I want to offer my perspective on the AI thing from the point of view of a senior individual contributor at a larger company. Management loves the idea, but there will be a lot of developers fixing auto-generated code full of bad practices and mysterious bugs at any company that tries to lean on it instead of good devs. A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic. It'll happily generate string-templated SQL queries that are ripe for SQL injection. I've had to fix this myself. Things get even worse when you have to deal with a shit language like Bash that is absolutely full of God awful footguns. Sometimes you have to use that wretched piece of trash language, and the scripts generated are horrific. Remember that time when Steam on Linux was effectively running
rm -rf /*on people's systems? I've had to fix that same type of issue multiple times at my workplace.I think LLMs will genuinely transform parts of the software industry, but I absolutely do not think they're going to stand in for competent developers in the near future. Maybe they can help junior developers who don't have a good grasp on syntax and patterns and such. I've personally felt no need to use them, since I spend about 95% of my time on architecture, testing, and documentation.
Now, do the higher-ups think the way that I do? Absolutely not. I've had senior management ask me about how I'm using AI tooling, and they always seem so disappointed when I explain why I personally don't feel the need for it and what I feel its weaknesses are. Bossman sees it as a way to magically multiply IC efficiency for nothing, so I absolutely agree that it's likely playing a part in at least some of these layoffs.
So basically, once again, management has no concept of the work and processes involved in creating/improving [thing], but still want to throw in the latest and greatest [buzzword/tech-of-the-day], and then are flabbergasted why their devs/engineers/people who actually do the work tell them it's a bad idea.
I'm pretty excited about LLMs being force multipliers in our industry. GitHub's Copilot has been pretty useful (at times). If I'm writing a little utility function and basically just write out the function signature, it'll fill out the meat. Often makes little mistakes, but I just need to follow up with little tweaks and tests (that it'll also often write).
It also seems to take context of my overall work at the time somehow and infers what I'll do next occasionally, to my astonishment.
It's absolutely not replacing me any time soon, but it sure can be helpful in saving me time and hassle.
Tragically, this seems to be the minority viewpoint - at least among CS students. A lot of my peers seem to have convinced themselves that the hallucination machines are intelligent... even when it vomits unsound garbage into their lap.
This is made worse by the fact that most of our work is simple and/or derivative enough for
$MODELto usually give the right answer, which reinforces the majority "thinking machine" viewpoint - while in reality, generating an implementation of&using only~and|is hardly an Earth-shattering accomplishment.And yes, it screws them academically. It doesn't take a genius to connect the dots when the professor who encourages Copilot use has a sub-50% test average.
To add to this, at my company, we've received a mandate to avoid putting any code into an AI prompt because of privacy concerns. So effectively no one is using it here.
There's your mistake, treating bash like a language and not like a scripting tool. Its strength is that it's a common standard available on almost every machine because its older than most of us, its weakness is that it's full of horribly outdated syntax because its older than most of us. If used to script other processes it's great, but when you start using it as a language then the number of ways you can do something horrible that sort of works makes JavaScript look slick!
Are we great again yet?
I'm here to repeal and replace good things, and I'm all out of "replace".
I completely agree, although I think AI is more likely to have impact marketing, communications, PR, creative and PM type roles (and there are a lot of those in tech companies). I suspect we will see a noticeable reduction in tech workers over the next decade.
Note that this also impacted other projects that take a lot of capital up front, then provide a return over a very long term. There was a nuclear power plant project with NuScale in Utah that got shelved over this; with interest rates suddenly going from way low to way high, the economics get upended.
I'd bet that in general, infrastructure spending dropped across the board.
This is true right now. If you know how to use AI tools, it's not that hard to work 5-10x faster as a programmer than it used to be. You still have to know what you're doing, but a lot of the grunt work and typing that used to comprise the job is now basically gone.
I have no idea, but I can't possibly imagine that that's having no impact on resource allocation and hiring / firing decisions.
Lol AI ain't that good, bud.
I love the speed-up. And I'm sure it factors into CEO and CIO decisions. But they're on their way to learning, once again, that "code faster" never had anything to do with success or failure in efforts that require programmers.
Source: I sought great power, and I became one of the fastest coders, but it didn't make my problems or my boss's problems go away.
Can you elaborate on this part? What's your idea of proper usage?
Do you work in a technical role? I've dabbled in using AI to help out when working on projects, but I would say it's hit or miss on actually helping, as in sometimes it helps me move a bit faster and sometimes it slows me down.
However, that's just for the raw "let's write some code part of the work". Anything beyond that in my roles and responsibilities doesn't really intersect with what AI can currently do, so I'm not sure where I would get a 5-10x speed-up from.
Honestly I'm not sure if I'm taking a wrong approach or if everyone else is blowing things out of proportion.