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Businesses Technology

Tech Layoffs Are All But a Thing of the Past (techcrunch.com) 83

Posted by BeauHD from the market-analysis dept.
Alex Wilhelm writes via TechCrunch: Layoffs in the technology industry have slowed sharply in recent months, bringing the number of jobs lost to tech's efficiency push to a near stop. According to several services that track layoffs in the tech industry, after reaching a local maximum in January, the number of people laid off had declined by more than 90% by September. What's more, some tech companies are hiring again to refill some of the roles that they had eliminated mere months ago.

Such a quick shift from mass personnel cuts to more stable employee rolls and even hiring efforts may seem surprising, but it's been a long time in the making. Data from popular tech industry layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi shows that job cuts have slowed for seven consecutive months this year, plateauing around 10,000 per month from June through August and declining to just over 3,000 so far in September. TrueUp, a jobs board focused on the tech industry, also marked that tech industry layoffs peaked in January and declined sharply thereafter. However, TrueUp's layoff count shows a slightly lumpier trend in the total number of staff cuts. Regardless of the source, though, the trend is clear that job cuts are on the decline.
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Tech Layoffs Are All But a Thing of the Past More

Tech Layoffs Are All But a Thing of the Past

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  • 2024 is coming (Score:5, Informative)

    by Austerity Empowers ( 669817 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:24PM (#63882107)

    We probably should not start the celebrations yet. I know my employer plans to do almost no hiring and based on their RTO policy, intends to let steady attrition continue. Other companies, run by mercurial tech bros likely still have troubles ahead.

    • Re:2024 is coming (Score:5, Insightful)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:55PM (#63882157) Journal
      The managerial class doesn't know how to run a software team. They have no idea how many people they need, when to hire, when to do layoffs, or when the team is being inefficient.

      Therefore, they hired because everyone else was hiring, and did layoffs because everyone else was doing layoffs. If these stories keep coming, then they will think it's time to do hiring again.

      • I don't know what year you think it is (Score:5, Interesting)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @07:47PM (#63882209)
        But America hasn't had a managerial class since the late 90s. Managers have been doing line work since then. Hell when I was back working call center is the managers were taking calls with me. And even today when I'm doing consultancy work my manager is doing line work next to me. It's been a long time since factories were hiring managers and Foreman to keep an eye on employees. They haven't had to do that in a while because they broke the unions with Reagan in the '80s.

        The class you need to be concerned with isn't managers it's the owners. People who don't work for a living but just own things for a living. You have more in common with even the pointiest hair to pointy-haired bosses then you do with somebody who never worked a day in their life and makes every single penny from what they own. If you go all the way up to the c-suites you'll find something closer to what you're calling a manager but those guys are members of the same class as the owners and their money comes from owning shit to not work. Compensation they get as CEOs is way less than they get from their stock and those golden parachutes are just a nice bonus because the owner class takes care of its own.

        The point is you need to be careful where you focus your anger because there are people out there spending a whole lot of money to make sure it's focused in the wrong direction.

        • Re:I don't know what year you think it is (Score:5, Interesting)

          by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @08:37PM (#63882275) Journal
          Nah there's a class of people who got MBAs and they are the managerial class because all they know how to do is manage. When they see a company that is successful, they swarm over there, take control of the company, then focus all their time on getting promoted and backstabbing other managers. They don't know what it takes to actually build something of value (generally they think it involves "hiring someone who knows how to do it"). The managers at the bottom of the org chart are just entry level, a lot of them don't even know they are in the game. That's why they're still at the bottom.

          This is as opposed to "managers" who are just trying to build something, and who can be really great.
          • In the actual tech sector, the skill sets that actually carry the intrinsic value. Those are run by Managers and SR Managers who were SREs and SR Dev Ops engineers who know everything. Sound like you might have worked for a bad company.
            • SREs and SR Dev Ops engineers don't know everything, and they aren't running companies, even after getting promoted.

          • So it's basically the same kind of locusts that investment companies are, just on a lower level and killing off the locusts.

            Kinda like a parasite's parasite.

            • lol it's like private equity takeover firms. I hadn't thought of that but it's an interesting comparison. There is probably some overlap there.
            • how does a person make their money? Is it from going to work 40+/hr a week or is it because they own shit.

              If the answer is "own shit" and you're in the other group, that's your enemy.

              • I do own shit, thanks...

                I own a house that I let to a very capable person who knows how to fix things. We have an agreement, he knows how to fix things, he keeps everything in the house in good repair, I pay for the materials, he does the work and he lives in it and he pays a very low rent to stay there. We're both happy. He has a house that he keeps in good repair for just doing the work and me paying the mats, I have a house that is kept in a kick-ass state for just the materials and I get a moderate inco

          • they've been getting stuck with line work for ages. Responsibilities bleed over into them. That's been going on since the early 2000s, and the last of the pure managers were wiped out in 2008.

            It's the same trick they used with Fast Food managers since the 80s. Take somebody doing line work, "promote" them, maybe bump their salary 1% (or maybe not at all) and you get somebody to do the paper pushing you want/need while also doing double duty as a worker. Basically 2 employees for the price of 1.

            But ev

      • We're currently hiring. Like mad. When our CEO learned that the big companies are firing people, his reaction was basically "now's the time to get talent easily".

        • Let me guess, 100% onsite office work with no free parking in a perpetually congested area of town? Sure there's no shortage of openings as people are constantly leaving/suiciding for a better options. If you're remote and looking for a raise your current employer will never give you, you're probably out of luck. I've already moved to a lower cost country to make it work, I'll be damned if I step foot in another highrise.

          • Nope. 60% on site "if you can make it, we'd like it if you do but if that's not an option, hey, that's ok..."

            We're talking security here. Companies are effin' desperate to attract security personnel. Remote work? NO problem! We don't care where you are, as long as you at least pretend to work for us!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          We're currently hiring. Like mad. When our CEO learned that the big companies are firing people, his reaction was basically "now's the time to get talent easily".

          Yup, and this was what I and hundreds of other people said when the first rumors of my current employer considering layoffs happened. Unfortunately, the c-suite people didn't listen, and they laid off a lot of people, most of whom we'll never get back, many of whom resulted in huge gaps in institutional knowledge that we've had to build back at enormous expense that far exceeded the superficial cost savings.

          There are two types of management: the ones who have a long vision and the ones who are so focused o

    • I think the thing is there's still a lot of money to be made out there and you're going to need employees to make it. If your company backs off on hiring they're going to be losing out to companies that don't. At the end of the day I know employers look at employees as these nasty little things that need to be stamped out and they're all desperately hoping AI lets them do away with us completely but we're still a ways off from that. So your company does have the option to stop hiring and maybe they're big e

    • We probably should not start the celebrations yet. I know my employer plans to do almost no hiring and based on their RTO policy, intends to let steady attrition continue. Other companies, run by mercurial tech bros likely still have troubles ahead.

      That whole headline is just asking for trouble, daring the gods of fate to hoist the writers on their own petard. We should bookmark this post for the future.

  • It was right here, on Slashdot. Google was laying off 2,500 from their recruiting department. I don't know how big their recruiting department is, but for those 2,500 I am sure that lay offs aren't over yet.

  • Move to the Midwest (Score:4, Informative)

    by memory_register ( 6248354 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:37PM (#63882129)
    We are hiring like mad here, plus you can buy a nice 4 bedroom house on a half acre for 300k.

    • Remote!

      • Why again would I work remotely from SF or LA, living in a tiny box that I pay a fortune off if I can just move to a mansion that costs me a fraction of that shoe box and live there, too?

        And it's neither LA nor SF, too!

  • Title and summary don't match. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RedK ( 112790 ) on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:47PM (#63882143)

    Title : "Layoffs are a thing of the past!"

    Summary : "Ok, we're still seeing layoffs right now, but it's slowing down!".

    This whole post sounds like massive cope.

  • Did AI come up with this wee bit of not that epic.

  • Say, did anyone get laid off here? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Thursday September 28, 2023 @01:37AM (#63882677)

    Because I tend to hear a lot about this or that company firing people, but I don't exactly see a lot of that happening. What I do see instead is headhunters desperately trying to get my attention because apparently there's so many companies that can't fill their positions.

    Why do I get the feeling that a nontrivial amount of this is just FUD to whip the uppity peons back in line?

    • Because I tend to hear a lot about this or that company firing people, but I don't exactly see a lot of that happening. What I do see instead is headhunters desperately trying to get my attention because apparently there's so many companies that can't fill their positions.

      Why do I get the feeling that a nontrivial amount of this is just FUD to whip the uppity peons back in line?

      I was laid off multiple times during the pandemic (2020-2023). The pandemic changed the market for one company, so sales dropped by 50% year over year. You can imagine the size of that layoff. Another company grew too quickly, but during the pandemic had supply chain issues and had to readjust the size of its workforce. I was laid off from another company because they had to change focus during the pandemic and needed skills I had not yet acquired.

      I personally know about 200 people in the tech industry laid

      • I meant more in the past 3 months or so, you know, the time since suddenly the sky is falling and EVERYONE is firing EVERYONE.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bob_Who ( 926234 )

      Why do I get the feeling that a nontrivial amount of this is just FUD to whip the uppity peons back in line?

      You're a poet, sir!

  • It's not all rosy out there... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Equuleus42 ( 723 ) on Thursday September 28, 2023 @02:18AM (#63882709) Homepage

    This [licdn.com] chart from Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta, paints a very different picture. According to his post earlier today:

    - About half of the startups that closed shop did so without raising any VC rounds. The other half had at least one priced round in their history.
    - Within the cohort that had raised from VCs, 90% of the shutdown were either Seed or Series A startups.
    - 34 startups that raised a Series B or later have shut down so far this year - that's higher than the 25 in 2022.
    - 87 startups that raised at least $10 million have shut down this year. That's nearly 2x the total from last year.
    Any way you slice it, this is the most difficult year for startups in at least a decade.

    • VCs don't throw money around anymore because they don't believe that startups have a viable business model going and there is a very low chance that any of the big players hoover them up. What else is new? That has little effect on jobs for "normal" people, that's more a matter for investors and people wanting to start a business.

  • [Gary Oldman]
    "Fire one million."

  • I was laid off, but was told I couldn't use the term "laid off". The company altered performance reviews so that even the time I was employee of the month the review appears I was lacking. Now repeat that for 100 employees across all divisions. Investors and Wall Street didn't see a lay off event, so stock price wasn't affected. Most of us live in work at will states meaning neither employee nor employer needs to give a reason for severing the contract. When a company answers to investors or Wall Street, th

  • Still happeing (Score:4, Funny)

    by gabrieltss ( 64078 ) on Thursday September 28, 2023 @10:14AM (#63883405)
    My previous employer, eliminated just about -all- the IT jobs and outsourced them to India. Now they are crashing and burning and asking former employees to come back as contractors to clean up the mess.
    Surprise! They are getting lots of F! U's!
    Just waiting for the "Closed" sign to go on the door now.
    • This is stupid.

      You tell them "Sure, $250 / hour with a $25,000 retainer" and send over a contract for them to sign.

      Taking it personally is silly if it takes money out of your wallet.

      • There are things that can't be bought with money.

        You can't put a price to watching a stupid CEO crash and burn.

    • My previous employer eliminated about half of the jobs after being acquired by an American company. For the rest they made the climate at work so unpleasant that most people left voluntarily. All these jobs went to India, with the same result as you describe. Matter of fact, my previous employer now pays my current employer for my time.

  • Epic Games: "Leeeeeeeeeeroy Jenkins!" https://kotaku.com/epic-games-... [kotaku.com]
  • Why would a tech company lay people off when they can just announce RTO and get them to leave voluntarily.

    • For exactly the reason that has been explained time and time again: If you let people quit on their own, the ones that DO work will quit because they can easily find new jobs, since they usually have something to show for, have degrees, have certificates and a github account filled to the brim with private projects to show off.

      What you retain is the duds that can't just jump ship and have to grin and bear it because they can't get hired anywhere else.

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