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Tech Layoffs Highest Since Dot-Com Crash (cnbc.com) 98

Posted by BeauHD from the uncertain-times dept.
Alex Koller reports via CNBC: Since the start of the year, more than 50,000 workers have been laid off from over 200 tech companies, according to tracking website Layoffs.fyi. It's a continuation of the predominant theme of 2023, when more than 260,000 workers across nearly 1,200 tech companies lost their jobs. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have all taken part in the downsizing this year, along with eBay, Unity Software, SAP and Cisco. Wall Street has largely cheered on the cost-cutting, sending many tech stocks to record highs on optimism that spending discipline coupled with efficiency gains from artificial intelligence will lead to rising profits. PayPal announced in January that it was eliminating 9% of its workforce, or about 2,500 jobs.

All told, 2023 was the second-biggest year of cuts on record in the technology sector, behind only the dot-com crash in 2001, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Not since the spectacular flameouts of Pets.com, eToys and Webvan have so many tech workers lost their jobs in such a short period of time. Last month's job cut count was the highest of any February since 2009, when the financial crisis forced companies into cash preservation mode.

CNBC spoke to a dozen people who have been laid off from tech jobs in the past year or so about their experiences navigating the labor market. Some spoke on the condition that CNBC not use their names or write about the details of their situation. Taken together, they paint a picture of an increasingly competitive market with job listings that include exacting requirements for qualification and come with lower pay than their prior gigs. It's a particularly confounding situation for software developers and data scientists, who just a couple of years ago had some of the most marketable and highly valued skills on the planet, and are now considering whether they need to exit the industry to find employment.
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Tech Layoffs Highest Since Dot-Com Crash More

Tech Layoffs Highest Since Dot-Com Crash

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  • "Software Engineers" (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It's called separating the wheat from the chaff. And it's going to take time because there's a lot of chaff out there.

    • Re:"Software Engineers" (Score:4, Funny)

      by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Friday March 15, 2024 @10:28PM (#64319137)

      What are you talking about? I'm stack overflow certified.

    • Re:"Software Engineers" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Friday March 15, 2024 @10:52PM (#64319167) Homepage Journal

      You assume management is competent enough to sort the productive employees from the dead weight. These layoffs are surgery with a shotgun blast rather than a scalpel.

      • You assume management is competent enough to sort the productive employees from the dead weight.

        When starting new projects, ask the programmers who they want on their team.

        If nobody ever wants Ted, then Ted is gonna get right-sized.

        • Thanks for the flippant suggestion that has no practical use in the real world. If you only get to pick one person, there will be a lot of people who didn't get picked, perhaps more than half. And I hope you don't interpret that result as you should layoff half the team. If you get to pick as many as you want, then statistically everyone would be covered because people are likely to side-step the question and suggest everyone is needed. If instead you ask employees to pick one person to eliminate? Wow. That

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Calydor ( 739835 )

          Wow, that sounds like kindergarten levels of popularity contests. So now your job security is tied to being on the good side of the bully leader of the group?

        • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

          by GrumpySteen ( 1250194 )

          That ignores the possibility that Ted may be the best programmer in the company, but he's but about critiquing other people's code.

          Or maybe Ted microwaves fish on Fridays.

          Or maybe Ted keeps telling the other male coders to knock it off when they make sexist remarks about the few women coders.

          Or maybe Ted is a recovering alcoholic who doesn't go out for drinks with the group to celebrate projects, so he gets painted as antisocial.

          When you turn popularity into a job qualification, what you get is what we have

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jon3k ( 691256 )

            Or maybe Ted microwaves fish on Fridays.

            Should be grounds for immediate dismissal.

            Or maybe Ted keeps telling the other male coders to knock it off when they make sexist remarks about the few women coders.

            Ted should go talk to HR and not get caught up in work drama. This should be documented by HR immediately so that they can take disciplinary action. It also means that if HR doesn't take action, the offended parties could go after the company if it continues. Trying to "fix" this stuff yourself is literally the worst possible course of action.

            Or maybe Ted is a recovering alcoholic who doesn't go out for drinks with the group to celebrate projects, so he gets painted as antisocial.

            You think everyone would want Ted fired just because he doesn't go out for drinks? No one cares unless he's anti-social d

          • Or maybe Ted is the the toxic worker and everyone is simply sick of his shit.

            Or maybe Ted microwaves fish on Fridays.

            That should be grounds for immediate termination.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by ls671 ( 1122017 )

          You assume management is competent enough to sort the productive employees from the dead weight.

          When starting new projects, ask the programmers who they want on their team.

          If nobody ever wants Ted, then Ted is gonna get right-sized.

          Could be the perfect way to keep the dumbest people around, those who like to live in an echo chamber and all repeat the same things and express the same views. At least, I see a risk of that with your suggestion and a risk of your company becoming infiltrated/controlled by a mob of people whatever their ideas are eventually like it happens elsewhere.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jmccue ( 834797 )
        This, all too often over the years I have seen great talent fired because they do not do "marketing speak".

      • Usually such firing sprees easily separate the "good" developers from the "bad" ones. After all, if finding a new job is easy for you, as you are good at what you do, you are more likely to go voluntarily in order to protect the people around you.

        So it's a great way to cast out the more competent people.

    • It's called separating the wheat from the chaff. And it's going to take time because there's a lot of chaff out there.

      Which would be fine except that HR morons are doing the separating . . .

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      So basically you're in favour of retaining the workers and firing management and HR.

      • So basically you're in favor of retaining the workers and firing management and HR.

        Yes, you've got that right. I also support employee unions.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ac2022 ( 9142601 )
      Layoffs has nothing to do with employees. Large corps protect their ecosystem via buying all talent from the market, they just deprive competitors of people who can create competitive products. This is especially true in Software Engineering space, look at volume of open source projects, the entire open source ecosystem is basically piracy of commercially successful ideas. It takes years to evolve some products and months to rewrite them into open source. So the same happens in start up space, small start u

  • crapification on the horizon (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Morromist ( 1207276 ) on Friday March 15, 2024 @10:41PM (#64319149)

    Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft operate monopolistic anti-competition machines with users trapped in their systems because of steep exiting costs. (especially Microsoft).

    I suspect they wouldn't be laying off armies of tech workers if they didn't feel very secure that compition is impossible at this point.

    Next thing to do is start raising prices and cutting services.

    • It's never been easier to compete, because the software has never been this terrible.

      Office stinks on ice all day. And the web version is even worse. The performance is good, which ain't nothin', but the interfaces are no longer good. And I've used a lot of versions of office, and still whip out Excel '98 sometimes because LO Calc is bad.

      • ...because LO Calc is bad.

        I'm the other way around. When someone sends me an Excel document, I load it up in Calc because getting stuff done in Excel is an exercise in never-ending frustration.

    • Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft operate monopolistic anti-competition machines

      Switching from Google to Bing takes about ten seconds.

      Walmart sells way more stuff than Amazon.

      I have a FaceBook account, which I check about once a month. There are plenty of other sites for social interaction.

      Microsoft is more of a monopoly, but 90% of people could switch to a Chromebook with no problem. Their user interface is the browser.

      • Google Analytics, and therefore Google Adservice. Not the god damn search engine that is getting more and more irrelevant each passing day as bot generates sited are not filtered out of the algorithm.
        And you don't get what Facebook is used for or is in the present. It could potentially get replaced, but nothing in the ecosystem has anywhere near the entrenchment.
        Microsoft might finally get toppled by Web 2.0, which for all intents and purposes finally arrived because of HTML5 and not back in 2004. But you s

  • So Overblown (Score:3)

    by ForkInMe ( 6978200 ) on Friday March 15, 2024 @11:10PM (#64319193)
    I personally know 3 people that were laid off in the last 6 months (2 laid off, 1 contract not renewed) and they were unemployed exactly as long as they wanted to be...landing great jobs in smaller firms that had been talking to them for months. And the 1 on contract was offered a job at the company in lieu of the contract but it was going to be onsite so she turned it down to take another offer.
    • I wonder if WFH will increase turnover without increasing unemployment. Connecting to a different VPN in the morning is a heck of a lot easier than uprooting and relocating.
    • Someone very close was laid off 6 months ago and still hasn't found a job. I think there's more of me's than of you's.

    • Ok everybody, you heard it here first! You have absolutely NOTHING to worry about when you get laid off. Jobs are plenty and the pay is outstanding. Let's go!

      (as an aside, what was the purpose of your communication? yeah, great, you know a few people who were unburdened by job hunting. that will happen to some people in the tightest of job markets. that doesn't really help the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, find a job. or are you under the impression that local events mimic external event

  • Absolute numbers, not percentages. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Shag ( 3737 ) on Friday March 15, 2024 @11:29PM (#64319207) Journal

    168,032 vs 168,395 seems pretty close... if US tech industry headcount in 2023 was the same as it was in 2001. Which it wasn't. A Deloitte report [deloitte.com] from 2021 indicates the industry grew from ~3.6 million workers in 2001 to ~5m+ in 2021. So the 2023 layoffs affected a smaller percentage of the workforce.

    Of course, that ~40% overall growth in industry headcount pales in comparison to the growth seen by MFAANG - 4x for Microsoft, 15x for Apple, 40x for Netflix, 50x for Meta (just since 2009), 600x for Google, and 2000x for Amazon.

  • garbage software is in use in HR (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Walt Dismal ( 534799 ) on Friday March 15, 2024 @11:57PM (#64319221)

    One thing that's egregious this time around is that 99% of HR departments have switched to automated resume screening that actually block many qualified candidates for reasons I will explain, and for resumes that do pass through, they are further screened by low-end clerical labor that has no knowledge of fields so cannot make valid decisions. So many competent people are being blocked by idiots in HR. You get ranked by how many keywords your resume matches, but the SW cannot read between the lines and understand experience.

    The current state of the art in HR automation uses Applicant Tracking Systems or ATS, that are dumb software pretending to be AI. It isn't. This software mis-scans text, mislabels entry data, and in general is a giant clusterfu.. Some good amount of it was written by offshore labor and reflects that. The code barely handles syntax and is terrible at semantic analysis. It is mostly just keyword matches and score keeping.

    ATSs look for keywords entered by HR personnel, who frequently misinterpret what a manager states and wants. For example, if you state 'ten years experience with Linux' on your resume but the manager has asked for operating system experience, the ATS will reject you and even if you get through the final round, an ignorant clerk who knows nothing about programming may reject you for not matching the keywords operating and system. If you said Java or C++ but the manager said 'need skills in object-oriented programming' the moron ATS will reject you.

    Another problem is ATS SW rejects people having too much experience in its opinion. An ATS would actually reject Donald Knuth or Linus Torvalds for having worked on too many projects in their career. No, I am not exaggerating. An ATS might reject a doctor for having too much experience.

    Modern ATS seem to be tuned to do things like accept candidates with roughly 3 to 6 years in maybe two or three jobs, others with more jobs might get classified as job jumpers by badly trained AIs. If you have been a contractor for too many years, you WILL get rejected as a job jumper no matter what projects you ran to success.

    HR screening software has turned to s**t in the last five years.

    If you want to read horror stories, look up ATS software and see what garbage is and how it can screw people.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by sixoh1 ( 996418 )

      What’s the alternative though? Those same HR drones are maybe even _worse_ at resume analysis than a grep search, or they were the last time I had to work with one (hr drone) - they could not (or would not) tell the difference between a MS in Comp Eng. from a diploma mill and a 20 year veteran with a high school music cert (pro tip, the 20 year veteran was hands down the best software artist I’ve ever hired), they kept feeding me “highly qualified” people who were great at doing test

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ls671 ( 1122017 )

        Those same HR drones are maybe even _worse_ at resume analysis than a grep search

        I do all my searches with combinations of egrep -r and egrep -rv piped together, you insensitive clod! Much better that what you seem to suggest!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by m00sh ( 2538182 )

      Please don't complain about HR. It takes professionals with years of experience and an actual interview to decipher a resume.

      A resume might say "rocket scientist" equivalent in absolute jargon filled line but it could be just that they played Kerbel space game for a few days.

    • Modern ATS seem to be tuned to do things like accept candidates with roughly 3 to 6 years in maybe two or three jobs, others with more jobs might get classified as job jumpers by badly trained AIs.

      When I was looking for a job abut a year ago or so, the way I dealt with bad keyword scans and issues like what you mentioned above, by carefully assembling the resume.

      For one thing, I had a section of nothing but keywords on a side bar of the resume, in larger type, for very easy scanning (both human and machine)

    • Statistical rules seem to provide iron clad "knowledge" with Quantum Mechanics. Why do you believe statistical rules do not provide iron clad employees? Sure, there are some individual outcomes that are less than desirable; however, as a rule, the best employees are being found. To doubt otherwise is to doubt all of human knowledge and Quantum Mechanics and AI.

      Statistics. It doesn't matter what your personal experience is.

  • lower pay is the key here (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rapjr ( 732628 ) on Saturday March 16, 2024 @12:30AM (#64319241)
    The big companies are all doing it at about the same time, while complaining there is a worker shortage, and offering jobs with lower pay. This sounds like tacit collusion where they are essentially swapping workers in order to lower the workers pay and keep the better employees from jumping ship for higher pay elsewhere. It seems likely to backfire this time, the pandemic probably really did create a worker shortage due to long covid and retirement so these companies are going to end up shortchanging themselves when they can't find the people they need because they've pissed them off.

    And good luck getting workers to train their AI replacements, how does one person even go about training an LLM to perform individual specific tasks, learn workflows, business processes, architectures, and explain legacy code to it? If you've used code generators you know they don't produce maintainable code; if you have AI's creating code it seems likely to spin into spaghetti fast because the AI's will choose what works for obscure reasons rather than maintain coherence until only an AI can understand it. If you can't understand your product it is out of your control.

    And when the next big thing in software arrives and the AI's knowledge becomes obsolete and there hasn't been time to build up enough free knowledge that can be harvested, what are they going to train the models on? The models can't actually learn new paradigms if there is no data to learn from. And if you think AGI is going to happen soon, then who needs a CEO or management? Or a government for that matter. Or money.

    • You're right that LLMs are nowhere near capable enough for coding. But the interesting part is that code execution can generate feedback to teach LLMs. I expect much better coding LLMs in the near future based on LLMs generating their own training data.

      • LLMs cannot train themselves.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hjf ( 703092 )

        This already exists and it was released this week. It's called Devin AI and it codes, reads logs, googles, and fixes code, in a loop, until it gets it right.

        • I'd be curious to see someone feed it an NP complete problem. If that takes too long to solve, someone is bound to ask it whether the process will halt.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by m00sh ( 2538182 )

          This already exists and it was released this week. It's called Devin AI and it codes, reads logs, googles, and fixes code, in a loop, until it gets it right.

          Be careful of the hype.

          Similar products and projects were hyped when LLMs became mainstream. They went nowhere.

          But, you got one thing right: "in a loop". It is so easy for it to get caught in a loop and waste API money.

        • How is that 'gets it right' ?

        • This already exists and it was released this week. It's called Devin AI and it codes, reads logs, googles, and fixes code, in a loop, until it gets it right.

          In the same sense that if you somewhat randomly pull paragraphs from a really big shelf full of Romance novels, you can eventually end up with what resembles a Romance novel written by a 12 year old crack baby.

  • There's a ongoing new dot com crash. The problem is that current IT sector is many, many times larger then the IT sector in the year 2000 to 2001 when the last crash happened. This is a question if this collapse is going to reach critical point, something close to the housing market crash of 2008. If that happens, we are all going to know in few months and no longer than two to three years at most.

    • Gerome Powell is also warning a banking crisis is emerging from commercial real estate banks. So we're looking at something potentially much more serious than the media is letting on. They're selling a "soft landing," but it may hit much harder after the election no matter who wins.
  • Not surprising. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon are all established companies with mostly stable product lines that only need incremental development. But they still have workforces that are geared towards double-digit YoY growth. So either they start launching more products (doubtful), or we'll see their workforce stabilizing at about the current level.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hjf ( 703092 )

      And don't forget salaries. They were in a race to steal each other's talents and drove salaries way up, and now they need to make cuts.

      I suppose it's not really a good business model to pay entry level employees 150K/year while your product is free and also relies on you building half of the infrastructure to deliver it to the "customer".

  • If AI actually existed every tech worker would be working their dream job tomorrow morning at 9AM sharp.

    • Most tech workers seem to imagine they're immune to AI replacement. Even at the current level of AI, we're at the cusp of replacing the common entry-level people. That customer service chat agent that picks up key words and gives you what it thinks are relevant links before you click through to talk to a human? Any day now it'll be as good as the tier 1 human anyway. And shortly after that the tier 2 human. Coders are no different.

      The high level tech people who need to use intelligence and creativity r

  • Some folks who are perfectly decent programmers are going to find nowhere to go. It's sad, but that's the sort of heartless math that gets done when paradigms shift.

    Look, we had a good run. Many of us made a great career out if it. Mine started in 1992. Despite not going to college or university, I have been steadily employed the whole time. I don't get to code professionally anymore, but I did for decades. I could retire comfortably now, but I'm working as a project manager leading software development eff

  • Will result in temporary gain, followed by a collapse when customers realise they can get better products for either not much more or a great deal less.

    AI is "cheap" but produced vastly inferior results.

    That works when your product is cheap anyway and bought by people who are themselves cheapskates, which is why automation was effective in the Industrial Revolution. Mass-producing goods is only useful when you're selling to a huge market.

    Effective, but crippling in the long-term. Worker injuries and deaths

  • I know of several 'engineers' that have cheated on those coding interviews.

    They would setup 2 monitors and have a friend do googling and chatgpt prompts, feeding them answers on second monitor.

    Its funny to see them go through 6 months of onboarding, while layering in a second job and repeating the process.

    In case you are wondering, those engineers are from China.

  • about IT profession:

    1. The industry is volatile because technology is fast changing (plus silly fads mixed in)

    2. Even though you may make good money soon after graduating, your wages tend to plateau quicker than other fields. Ageism is one possible reason.

    3. RSI (wrist) problems are common, perhaps ending your career early if you are not cut out for management.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by m00sh ( 2538182 )

      I doubt universities even know anything about this.

      They are clueless people creating busy work to extract tuition from clueless students.

    • We keep telling students that technologies do not matter, the adaptability to whatever tech is coming up is what matters. That's why we focus on concepts and fundamentals with enough practical experience that they can go out and adapt. Are we succeeding? Not as much as I wish to be honest.

      Maybe you'll find it strange to know that local companies are the ones that are pushing the rhetoric that "Nothing matters! just push out 100 students that knows ${TECH_WE_USE_RIGHT_NOW}!". As is their plan was to hire a b

  • Not representative (Score:3)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Sunday March 17, 2024 @11:01PM (#64323469) Homepage

    This statistic applies to 200 specific companies in the tech sector. That sounds like a lot, but there are over 585,000 tech companies in the US alone.

    And 50,000 (or 260,000) sounds like a lot, but there are over 12 million tech industry workers in the US.

    Further, overall, the tech industry grew by 5.4% in 2023.

    https://www.zippia.com/advice/... [zippia.com].

    So this article picks and chooses statistics, finding the bad news it's looking for.

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