What's Different About These Tech Industry Layoffs? (stackoverflow.blog) 160
"According to one count, more than 280,000 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2022 and the first two months of 2023," notes a new blog post at Stack Overflow.
But then it asks the question: "What's different about these layoffs?" [T]he current economy has less in common than you might think with the wreckage of the dot-com bubble or the Great Recession. Overall, it's still a good time to work in tech, and the hiring market remains robust: One survey found that almost 80% of people laid off in tech found new roles within three months of launching their job search. There are more open tech positions than people to fill them (about 375,000, according to one estimate), and job listings between January and October 2022 were up 25% over the same period in 2021.
If the job market isn't as dire as we think, why does this round of layoffs feel so widespread, affecting companies often perceived as more recession-proof than their peers? Part of the answer may be what organizational behavior experts have termed "copycat layoffs." "Laying off employees turns out to be infectious," writes Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic. "When executives see their corporate competitors letting go of workers, they seize what they see as an opportunity to reduce their workforce, rather than having no choice but to do so...."
In many cases, workers laid off by household-name tech companies have found new jobs outside the traditional parameters of the tech industry, where their skill sets are in high demand. As Matt McLarty, global field chief technology officer for MuleSoft, told CNBC, businesses that have long needed tech professionals to upgrade their stack or guide a long-delayed cloud migration can now scoop up freshly laid-off tech workers (and those for whom Silicon Valley has lost its luster). Companies in energy and climate technology, healthcare, retail, finance, agriculture, and more are hiring tech pros at a steady clip, even if FAANG companies are less bullish. It's been said before that every company is a tech company, but in 2023, that's truer than ever. In fact, the biggest difference for tech workers this year, reports The New Stack, is that "the greatest opportunities may not lie exclusively in the FAANG companies anymore, but in more traditional industries that are upgrading their legacy stacks and embracing cloud native." Some of those opportunities also lie with startups, including ones helmed by Big Tech veterans ready to turn their layoffs into lemonade....
So whether you've been affected by the recent spate of layoffs or not, it's worth expanding your list of potential employers to include companies — even industries — you've never considered. You might find that they're thrilled to have you.
But then it asks the question: "What's different about these layoffs?" [T]he current economy has less in common than you might think with the wreckage of the dot-com bubble or the Great Recession. Overall, it's still a good time to work in tech, and the hiring market remains robust: One survey found that almost 80% of people laid off in tech found new roles within three months of launching their job search. There are more open tech positions than people to fill them (about 375,000, according to one estimate), and job listings between January and October 2022 were up 25% over the same period in 2021.
If the job market isn't as dire as we think, why does this round of layoffs feel so widespread, affecting companies often perceived as more recession-proof than their peers? Part of the answer may be what organizational behavior experts have termed "copycat layoffs." "Laying off employees turns out to be infectious," writes Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic. "When executives see their corporate competitors letting go of workers, they seize what they see as an opportunity to reduce their workforce, rather than having no choice but to do so...."
In many cases, workers laid off by household-name tech companies have found new jobs outside the traditional parameters of the tech industry, where their skill sets are in high demand. As Matt McLarty, global field chief technology officer for MuleSoft, told CNBC, businesses that have long needed tech professionals to upgrade their stack or guide a long-delayed cloud migration can now scoop up freshly laid-off tech workers (and those for whom Silicon Valley has lost its luster). Companies in energy and climate technology, healthcare, retail, finance, agriculture, and more are hiring tech pros at a steady clip, even if FAANG companies are less bullish. It's been said before that every company is a tech company, but in 2023, that's truer than ever. In fact, the biggest difference for tech workers this year, reports The New Stack, is that "the greatest opportunities may not lie exclusively in the FAANG companies anymore, but in more traditional industries that are upgrading their legacy stacks and embracing cloud native." Some of those opportunities also lie with startups, including ones helmed by Big Tech veterans ready to turn their layoffs into lemonade....
So whether you've been affected by the recent spate of layoffs or not, it's worth expanding your list of potential employers to include companies — even industries — you've never considered. You might find that they're thrilled to have you.
A purge of the remote? (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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It is when resources are constrained, usually temporarily and relatively quickly, that adjustments become painful and difficult. The current economic conditions are forcing many organizations to retract, and that forces painful and often opaque decisions. Those impacted, i.e. those who lose their jobs, readily accuse management of incompetence and greed, and they are sometimes right, though sometimes the changes are necessary.
Fat Lou Gerstner(1) years ago warned IBM employees that, essentially, if they didn
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Re: A purge of the remote? (Score:2)
Bluntly, I think you missed the point that scale doesn't change the problem. Big companies, massive companies fail the same damn way. And they fail for most of the same reasons. Small companies may have less wiggle room, but boy oh boy if a Google is really really bad, it shows up everywhere. And I'll leave this at that because I don't think you're really interested in a discussion, and I suppose I just want to blurt what I want to also.
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Re:A purge of the remote? (Score:5, Insightful)
I found the interruption by managers to be a lot less disruptive in a WFH environment where it's way easier to ignore the droning narcissist who loves to hear himself talk and continue working instead.
Not so easy if you're sitting with them in a room where they would notice that you don't give half a fuck about their navel gazing.
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I disagree about the skunkworks thing - actually, you can get a couple of people together on some crazy schedule which wouldn't suit anyone else - even if one of them has to run off to go grab their kids from school or whatever.
As for management getting in the way - yeah, some things don't change :-(
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Indeed it does, but note you just described two things: a) things which prevent efficient work, and b) projects which are rare at large established companies.
So yeah if you're working for a small agile tech startup, remote work is probably not suitable. For the other 99% of jobs out there you need to also make such an assessment.
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For this the "100% remote" job ads are way too numerous.
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It's a demonstration of how incompetent many managers are. Like sheep they copy each other, rather than looking at the long term business needs of their company.
In a few years everyone will be upset because Huawei invented 6G, while we were busy trimming our R&D budgets to protect quarterly bonuses.
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All you have to understand is that people aren't scared because of the fact they know there are other jobs out there really. For some people, especially some mid-level tech people living in Cali, this really sucks because they have high mortgages and other bills
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Is it really much more than a purge of the remote?
Remote work was embraced by companies of all sorts. The layoffs on the other hand are being embraced largely by the tech industry, and almost exclusively by companies which went on insane and unsustainable hiring practices over the past couple of years.
Remote work seems to have nothing to do with it. Plus it's far cheaper to declare an end to remote work and have your employees quit than it is to make them redundant.
Also in many countries in the world (the layoffs are not USA only) a company faces very seri
It feels a lot like scaremongering (Score:5, Interesting)
"Look, we're laying off thousands of workers, better fall in line and put your nose back to the grindstone or you get axed next".
Problem is, we can see the revolving door. You fire us and at the same time you and everyone else put ads out that you're desperate to hire.
Re:It feels a lot like scaremongering (Score:4, Informative)
You fire us and at the same time you and everyone else put ads out that you're desperate to hire.
They layoffs and the hires and not for the same skillsets.
Web developers are getting axed. Machine learning engineers are in demand.
Re:It feels a lot like scaremongering (Score:5, Interesting)
They often are for the same skillsets, but for much cheaper employees with broader skills. They're also an opportunity to discard older, staff or staff with kids, and very especially to discard anyone who might get pregnant. I'm afraid I just saw this at several small companies: it was understandable, since their previous staff always, _always_ resigned at the end of their maternity leave.
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That's a problem for politics to solve. If people resign after maternity leave, the sensible solution would be to have the state take care of the money (if they want people to have maternity leave, they can as well pay for it). Because that way it's way easier for the worker to just tell their employer that they plan to leave after that time anyway, so they can start looking for a replacement in time.
Re:It feels a lot like scaremongering (Score:5, Insightful)
If women ALWAYS resigned at the end of their maternity leave, that says the company had a very poor work/life balance and they felt they had no other choice. And their reaction of getting rid of people who they think might get pregnant only reinforces this. People leave when they feel the job is not taking care of them, and if there is a trend like this, it shows the job is definitely not taking care of these people.
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Or that they did have a choice and chose to be a full time parent instead of working, which is often better for the kids.
Since they are given maternity leave, obviously they will take the free money rather than resigning before the maternity leave because that would be utterly stupid.
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It is very possible that some of them choose this. But the idea that every single woman would rather be a full time parent (especially in a world where most people cannot afford to not have both parents working) instead of continuing to work is more than a little unbelievable.
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Frankly, I disagree. As long as I've been in the workforce, I've seen this play out. Women demand equal pay and equal treatment (fine), But they take on these job roles that were traditionally male-dominated and then get upset when they're held to the same standards the men always were as far as attendance.
It's convenient to try to "re frame" this as companies having a poor work/life balance. But that's not necessarily the case. They simply had a balance that worked fine when the typical arrangement was the
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Except what you are describing is exactly a lack of work/life balance, it's just that men were allowed to survive through it because they were not expected to take care of children. It's no different to boomers looking at the younger generation wanting a work/life balance and saying "well I worked like that so you have to as well". No, they don't. Things should change to where everyone has a better work/life balance. Men should be able to (and be expected to) actually help raise the children. If a parent is
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What you describe is a highly local problem and highly shitty, not a broad description of the practices across the industry and across the globe.
Specifically making someone redundant and hiring the same skillset is illegal in many countries.
As is discarding based on age and because you think they may get pregnant.
Yeah it does happen.
No your comment isn't even remotely relevant to the discussion of the countless tech layoffs currently ongoing.
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Depends. I don't want to work in a position that can be replaced by a university leaver, from recent interviews, that sort of work wouldn't interest me, I want a more technical role, the sort of thing that needs decades of experience, that sort of role isn't advertised as junior.
Anyway, staff with kids are less likely to be out partying late and start work late due to late socialising.
Demographic Shift (Score:5, Interesting)
They're scaremongering because the business leaders/central bankers/politicians can see the train wreck that is heading towards us - high inflation and/or asset price crashes.
There are simply not enough young workers coming into the workforce to replace the boomers/genX leaving and continuing to drive demand in the economy as they retire. This is the classic recipe for inflation.
Worse, immigration won't help this time, because it is a global demographic problem.
The only way to square this circle is that those retiring need to have a massive reduction in their ability to generate demand, or the govt finds some way to convince young workers to work harder and give up more of their income. From my point of view, that second option is now impossible, because young people don't have mortgages, children or stable careers. If things get tough they will just live more simply, or move to a cheaper area or country, which is already happening. The biggest asset young people have is that they can live somewhat independent of the rest of society and govt have turned being a productive member of society into a rentier trap.
I think the writing is on the wall now. Either inflation takes away retiree's spending power, or an asset price crash will. But the natural in/out flow of the global financialisation ponzi scheme is now going into reverse so it cannot be sustained for much longer.
Re:Demographic Shift (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a pretty apt analysis of the situation. Boomers are leaving the workforce, GenY/Millennials are not numerous enough to replace them. Boomers have taken all the money with them and now want to spend it on something but there simply isn't anything to buy. At the same time, you have a younger generation who has nothing and who was also smart enough to realize that, hey, I will never own anything. So why bother trying?
My generation, Gen-X, was maybe the last "owner" generation. The last generation that wanted to own something and also had a chance to fulfill that dream. I have a house, I have a car, and I actually own both of them. In the sense that I never needed a mortgage. Ok, not everyone is that lucky, but most in my generation won a house or apartment and have paid it off by now or are close to it. And we can generate the money necessary that we might even be able to retire at some point. Probably not as comfortably as our parent generation did but at least we can.
Looking at some Gen-Y/Gen-Z coworkers, they look at real estate prices and realize that nope, they will never own it. The second they earn a bit more and the house gets within reach, suddenly the price goes up by 50% and it's out of reach again. They don't even want to chase that dream anymore. They might want a house, but they also know they will never ever be able to afford one. Plus, they are vastly more mobile than my generation or any older generation was. Boomers never moved (in my country). They built a house and stayed there. I moved about twice in my life. My Gen-Y coworker who is barely 30 moved for the fifth time to get this job here. You think he's interested in owning a house? By the time the ink on that deed is dry he'll have to sell it.
And that sentiment seems to be general. This want for material things also isn't as big as it was for my generation, even. Gen-X grew up in the 80s and 90s, a time of hedonistic, raw materialism. You were defined by the clothes you wore and the things you consumed. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Less is more, social status is achieved by not consuming. There's way more emphasis now on environmental consciousness and social awareness.
So they not only lack the means to consume, it also seems like they lack the want to. And with that minimalist attitude comes a non-compliance with workplace demands. They don't have to put the nose to the grindstone, there isn't any mortgage or credit card debt pushing them down, they don't have to comply. They actually can afford to flip the PHBs of the world off, not because they're rich but because they don't want to be.
What's the solution to this? Well, inflation is one way. And it's likely going to be the only way. Because I highly doubt that we'll get the boomer generation to forgo what they perceive as their vested right: Consumption.
Re:Demographic Shift (Score:5, Interesting)
HOWEVER! To say that "people" (gen-x/y/z) are somehow not shallow and materialistic (consumers defined by the their clothes and how they look) today is ludicrous. Exhibit A: Instagram. Moving on.
For sure the cost of a house has skyrocketed, and I take your point.. you get halfway to the purchase and then property goes up in price again. A crappy scenario, to be sure.
Here's one though. The idea that GenZ is less motivated because they won't be able to afford consumer goods (a house/car)
So to be sure, and especially today, you have a point. People seem to only define success in terms of money. And that leads to rampant consumerism, and massive pollution. You are right that that cannot continue.
Energy experts have said we will de-carbonize whether we plan for it or not. I don't really see the planning. The future looks grim.
Re:Demographic Shift (Score:4, Interesting)
I didn't say GenZ isn't motivated to do something. I said that GenZ is not motivated by money, and trying to whip them into shape with the treat of being laid off will be met with a shrug and a manual binary four. They can be quite motivated to do something, they are actually trying to find a way to express their concerns and the various protests we currently see show that pretty well. If anything, the problem is that they are quite motivated to do something that is important to them but they don't have the means to do that.
TikTok and similar distractions are not necessarily a consumerist thing. If anything, you could see them as a distraction while waiting for something. TikTok videos tend to be very brief. Seconds in length. The same is true for many other media that are popular with Gen-Z. To me, this says they don't want to consume in the same way we did, by sitting down and consuming media for a prolonged time. Rather, it is something done as a means to bridge a waiting period. For a bus, for an appointment or for someone to stop droning on about something they're not interested in.
But yes, advertising is targeting the young generation, as it always did. It is the target audience for advertising, everyone older is already set in their ways and has decided on what they want to consume. I just don't see the same impact it had during my youth. We were far easier to convince that we have to buy the latest fashion, follow the latest fad and buy the latest gimmicks. I don't really see that anymore. It works, at best, with young teenagers whose main behavior influence is their consuming parents, but as they get older and their peer groups become more of an influence, the values of their older peers start to trickle down into their group. Anti-consumerism and social equality are pretty important issues with our teens and young adults, probably also as a counter-culture against their consume-crazy Gen-X parents who also just paid a lip service to social equality.
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Weird. Judging from what I see on TV when I still watch it, most ads seem to center around cheap food and booze. I can't imagine that the target audience for that is the rich and sophisticated people.
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It's like "feminism". Feminists of o
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People seem to only define success in terms of money.
No. People who don't have enough money define success in terms of money. Being happy doesn't count if I'm homeless. Being mentally challenged doesn't count if I'm homeless. That's basic psychology as defined by Maslow.
I have money. That's why I took a paycut to move to a job in another country and explore something new. I can say with a degree of certainty that this kind of definition of success in the form of personal happyness or self-actualision does not apply to the overwhelming majority of people in a
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If so, they are giving up to easily. Not every house has to be 3,200 sq ft with three bedrooms, 2-1/2 baths, a large kitchen, and a home office.
I bought my first house for a price 3 times my yearly pay at a time when mortgage interest rates were above 12%. It wa
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3 times an annual salary... have you checked real estate prices recently? Hell, I couldn't get a decent house that doesn't require "thermal remedial action" (read: burn it down and start over) at three times my annual salary, and I'm pretty high up in the salary pyramid. Or, in other words, I make about 3-5 times what the average person around here makes. Saving up for those 3 years would probably qualify me for the mortgage I need to buy that house.
Whether the interest rate is 12 or 2 percent means jack sh
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Maybe you live in Silicon Valley. In my average US city, I just checked the prices for a nearby working-class neighborhood full of 1950s-era shoebox houses about the size the GP post mentioned. There are many of those valued at $200-250K. That's 3X a $75K salary, which is certainly feasible.
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In your country maybe. Over here, you'd be already earning quite a bit of money with a 75k income.
But houses do cost about the same.
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There are many of those valued at $200-250K
Empty lots in Detroit don't count.
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It's not just about owning houses. Raising children is a significant creator of incentives to roll up one's sleeves and work. But that recipe doesn't work anymore, because the deal has soured.
A young person thinking about these things does not see a job market full of jobs that pay enough to raise a family, plus a pool of available spouse-potentials who will marry them and stay with them and raise a child with them and then enjoy golden years with them and play with their grandkids together. Instead they
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Indeed. The amount of DINKs in my circle of friends is quite impressive. These are also the people who can afford the houses that you'd need to raise kids, which they don't buy because they don't need them, which leaves them with quite a bit of surplus money.
And thinking about it, most of them are not married. What for? It's not like there is any financial incentive anymore, the drawbacks simply outweigh the advantages. Why marry when you can get pretty much the same deal with some sensible contracts?
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It may be tempting to accuse unmarried people of being afraid of commitment. But quite a lot is different now from the days when people stayed married their entire lives.
On the one hand, we make a very practical and realistic recognition that "the rest of your life" is actually quite a long time for a 20-year-old. Much longer than it was back when our concept of lifelong marriage was created. People can and do change significantly during these years, and absolutely can grow apart from one another. It is
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It's not exactly that I'm afraid of commitment, but ... why bother if there's not really a good reason? I can't really see any advantages to marriage. Or children for that matter. It seems like a horribly inefficient way to have someone to spend time with. Isn't it far more sensible to spend time with a person you enjoy for as long as you do and part ways when that stops to be the case? Marriage doesn't exactly facilitate that, if anything, it's detrimental to that very idea.
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Which makes me wonder how the market is going to shift again when all the boomers start dying off and the property they own is going to start to come free.
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It's not going to come free. They will eke out every second of lifetime from that money, don't expect to inherit anything from them.
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Which makes me wonder how the market is going to shift again when all the boomers start dying off and the property they own is going to start to come free.
Its called a reverse mortgage. Don't expect anything to be left for you unless you are a Boomer.
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But advancing technology is in a race with the relatively declining worker base. So, what one would predict is that e.g. manufactured goods whose production can be largely automated will continue to become cheaper, whereas services will keep going up in price.
I think we are seeing signs of this wit
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You're absolutely right about automation, but the problem is that we didn't automate away a lot of our jobs - we moved them to China. Now China has its own (far more serious) demographic issues, and we also have geopolitical problems as well. If western countries have to move back a large share of manufacturing work, we will be able to automate a lot of it, but I don't believe this can be done fast enough, or extensively enough to stop it creating a massive demand for labour as well.
In addition, we will nee
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> Do cars really need to have a backup camera?
Yes. That's become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the problem is more the fault of the designers than the required equipment. Before backup cameras were made mandatory, no car I owned, and very few that I ever rode in, would have needed one. I'm now on my first car since they became required equipment. And it would be almost impossible to parallel park without the camera. And I've noticed that friends' cars would be similarly difficult. W
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(True, some could be attributed to other factors like cracking down on drunk driving...)
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If there is a worker shortage, then wage inflation is natural and should not be avoided. Such wage inflation contributing to general inflation is not something to be curtailed.
The economy has too few workers, the last thing we want is to crank up interest rates so high that people are thrown out of work. If that means reduced retiree spending power or reduced asset values, then so be it.
That said, interests rates are not actually high right now, by historical standards. It would be okay to bring interest
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Problem is, we can see the revolving door. You fire us and at the same time you and everyone else put ads out that you're desperate to hire.
Not quite. That practice isn't actually legal in many countries. Just because I fire all my blockchain staff doesn't mean they aren't legitimately being made redundant as I hire an army of AI experts (who will be made redundant when I move on to the next marketable craze).
Maybe the public sector will get some good people (Score:3)
One of the challenges for public sector employers is getting really good staff; they struggle to pay the market rate and can be located in the middle of nowhere. Here's hoping some people who need their governments to be better run will see it happen.
Re:Maybe the public sector will get some good peop (Score:5, Informative)
Public sector, small businesses... they have all been starved of talent for a long time. Even a lot of medium-sized businesses have had challenges relative to normal hiring patterns. Government money is shifting around now, so there are plenty of industries that are hiring wherever they can.
Curious how many can/will support remote work though. I suspect that is too broad of a question to have a single definitive answer.
Re:Maybe the public sector will get some good peop (Score:5, Insightful)
They've been starved because they pay garbage rates in comparison to the tech sector itself.
There's a disconnect - tech pays well in the tech sector, especially as you move into the big tech space... those rates reflect the value that those people contribute to those industries. If you want tech outside the tech sector, you look at the value they provide and you probably don't realize (or more practically, can't quantify) the multiplicative effect they have on your entire business, so you pay them like you'd pay a leading warehouse worker, or an experienced accountant, and you wonder why you don't get even medium tier talent.
The problem is tech pays 2-5x those rates in businesses that properly understand and will leverage those skills appropriately. Hence, all those other businesses just end up outsourcing to third parties.
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I think the upper range of your 2-5x coupled with layoffs might foreshadow the problem.
Some of the issue is pay, but recruiting force is what we usually notice. It is hard for a 50-person company to get noticed when a Tech mega corp is also hiring. The pay delta I saw though was a maximum of 1.5x for more "average" candidates.
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> It is hard for a 50-person company to get noticed
> when a Tech mega corp is also hiring.
Not really. Some people prefer startups, others prefer the enterprise companies, just like some people prefer 1040 FTE work and others like 1099 contracts. The big guys like Apple, Google, Facebook, and the like recruit everywhere, of course. But there are specialized sites for those of us who like those 50-person (or smaller) startups. And even on big platforms like LinkedIn, it's fairly easy to set up your
Re:Maybe the public sector will get some good peop (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm on year 5 of working for the fed. I've never had a private sector job keep me around that long. The pay isn't bad, considering it's consistent. The problem is HR and how they hire.
Our HR is really lazy. They don't know how to read out of context. If your resume doesn't have 100% of $KEYWORDS then it gets rejected. On internal hires it's he who kisses the most ass that gets promoted, so you wind up with a bunch of guys who are technically skilled, get a ton of work closed but no promotion for it. Some guys are even held back if they work hard because a department head knows their numbers will suffer if the person gets promoted out. This leads to fast burnout and the eventual metamorphosis into the "Typical lazy government worker"
If the Fed could get merit based promotions dialed, the pay wouldn't be so bad.
It's Peak Digital. (Score:4, Interesting)
Many IT experts have seen this coming in recent years. The industrialization of IT is in full swing and virtualization, automation and next AI/ML will do the bulk of the "work", if you could even call it that. The only IT experts meetups still happening on a regular basis in my town are those of DevOps and even those guys have moved to discussing the various GUI config tools and management kits that automate most of their work as well.
The software-bots will take our jobs and if I'm lucky I'll basically be clicking together services and making some PO happy with colorful things to click on. And maybe fix some bad accident with a nightshift once or twice a year.
This is what we have been working on and it's finally arrived. In the end this will spell more wealth for all.
Re:It's Peak Digital. (Score:5, Interesting)
The industrialization of IT is in full swing and virtualization, automation and next AI/ML will do the bulk of the "work"
Automation of work usually leads to higher demand for labor.
This is an example of Jevons Paradox [wikipedia.org].
Think of it from an employer's point of view: If automation makes every developer twice as productive and thus twice as profitable, would you fire half of them, or hire more?
Re:It's Peak Digital. (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the automation does not produce products to sell. It reduces labor costs for support tasks. Why would you keep paying for an expense you no longer need?
I'll admit, keeping them is usually because some fool sold you 3 more layers of security analyzing tools and a complex and entirely unnecessary new work tracking system which will be used in addition to, rather than in place of your old system.
Re: It's Peak Digital. (Score:3)
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Most of the automation does not produce products to sell. It reduces labor costs for support tasks. Why would you keep paying for an expense you no longer need?
Well it kinda reduces labour costs, it also makes people more productive which means it's now more profitable to hire someone .
This about organization email a few years back:
1) Big companies had large in-house IT groups to do email
2) Medium companies outsourced or had small in-house IT groups.
3) Small companies had nothing since the expense to hire someone with the ability to run an email server was probably too high.
Now most orgs do Google Mail or something similar. That lead to big orgs reducing their IT
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That paradox only works as long as the automation creates jobs in other areas that can be staffed by the same people. This isn't the case here.
No, this paradox is specifically concerned with the same jobs which are being made more efficient. Just like when compilers made the work of programming more efficient, if these recent AI tools become more than vaporware they are also likely to make programmers even more efficient. This is then likely to make them in more demand, not less. There is no shortage of software that needs writing.
There are plenty of jobs outside of IT where the same may not be true. Customer service comes to mind if chat bots bec
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When compilers made programming easier, it opened up the market for a lot more people who could probably not develop anything resembling software if they had to go down to the metal, and it also allowed more complex systems because some of the work was taken over by the machines, which in turn meant that more programs could be written more cheaply, and that in turn made computers more useful for more applications.
The problem with AI in this regard is that anything it makes easier also makes the people less
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When compilers made programming easier, it opened up the market for a lot more people
The situation with AI is no different.
Compilers opened up the market for people who weren't productive in assembly but could write C code.
An AI that can generate C++ from ambiguous English text will, likewise, open up the market for people who don't understand C++ syntax but can describe software specs reasonably well and provide feedback until the chatbot gets it right.
There is only a finite demand for programming.
Citation needed.
Very limited layoffs (Score:4, Insightful)
Ultimately not that many people have been laid off as a percentage of workforce. Even in terms of average net-new jobs created it is only ~7% in 14 months. Most of the companies laying off most of the employees are also profitable, and doing layoffs to ensure they remain profitable no matter what might happen in the economy.
In 2000 it was unprofitable companies that had been binge hiring people, many of whom they were paying a lot of money for very low skill sets; when the easy money disappeared they were finished.
Mostly it is bloat removal (Score:4, Interesting)
Many of the big tech companies that are laying off managed to handle say half the customer base with say 1/10th the staff and have seen a large bloat in number of people in the last say 5 years. I do not think all the new hires were really needed..
Re:Mostly it is bloat removal (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more that they tried to starve the competition for resources (read: skilled workforce) and now can't, or at least don't want to, afford that war of attrition anymore.
Nah - you're assuming it's deliberate policy (Score:2)
It's more that they tried to starve the competition for resources (read: skilled workforce) and now can't, or at least don't want to, afford that war of attrition anymore.
The idea that companies would employ more than they need for that reason seems unlikely; the knock on consequences in terms of having to pay more adds to the case against. I would tend to blame it on managers wanting to have more underlings - always THE measure of how important you are - along with a desire to avoid having to rerecruit when a shortage of skilled workers is revealed. And remember that tech firms were always pressing for more H1B visas to be issued. Now the zeitgeist has changed (blame Musk's
Re: (Score:2)
It's more that they tried to starve the competition for resources (read: skilled workforce) and now can't, or at least don't want to, afford that war of attrition anymore.
The idea that companies would employ more than they need for that reason seems unlikely
If you paid attention to even a small amount of business news in the past 2 years you'd know this is simple fact, it is not some sort of wild theory, it is entirely mainstream. It is just the recent history of the tech industry.
Read news every day if you hope to argue about this stuff later.
An anti-trust violation with full publicity? (Score:2)
There's a class action suit waiting to happen if it could be proved, so I'm extremely dubious that anyone has admitted to this policy. Got any sources for your claim? I'll give you that the economic studies have demonstrated, to widespread surprise, that Amazon has been able to depress wages local to their warehouses by keeping their wages down, but this claim? Publicly admitted to? I'll be really impressed if I'm proved wrong!
Re: (Score:2)
What exactly would you want to sue over?
Re: (Score:2)
The allegation would be that the firms who employed more than enough people to deprive competitors of skilled staff were acting anti-competitively. It's my understanding that the anti-competition provisions are quite broad in their formulation, allowing this behaviour to be ruled unlawful.
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It's more that they tried to starve the competition for resources (read: skilled workforce) and now can't, or at least don't want to, afford that war of attrition anymore.
That seems fantastically unlikely.
More likely, there's always a bunch of internal pressure to hire if for no other reason than managers always want more staff on their teams (for reasons good and bad).
During the pandemic tech revenue surged, it was suddenly tougher to say no, and once others started hiring there was a lot more pressure to do the same and catch up.
Now the economy is a bit weaker saying no is a lot easier and the top level execs feel empowered to cut the head counts.
long overdue (Score:2)
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
Too bad /. never implemented comment search, it would take too long to find enough comments back from 6, 9, 11, 15, 20 years ago.
Just as people didn't realize they are inside a huge stock market bubble back in the late 90s, they didn't realize they are inside a huge housing bubble back in 2008, we are now inside a gigantic bond bubble, which given the Fed's response to it is leading to a gigantic US dollar bubble. We are actually inside a gigantic government bubble on this
Re: (Score:2)
Too bad /. never implemented comment search, it would take too long to find enough comments back from 6, 9, 11, 15, 20 years ago.
Thank goodness, wow, what sort of ass would use comment search to search for comments from 20 years ago? Get a grip.
Re: long overdue (Score:2)
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Inflation hasn't been terrible the past few years, to be honest. An inflation of about 2-4% is actually pretty beneficial. Out system depends on the sale of goods and services. If that stops, the economy stops. If you have no inflation or, worse, a deflation where your money actually becomes more and more valuable as time passes, why would I want to spend more money than I absolutely have to? If I can postpone buying 'til tomorrow, I'll get more of what I want to buy for the same money. Of course, an inflat
Re: (Score:3)
I know a lot of people don't get this, but if you work for a bank, it becomes second nature immediately: Money is just yet another commodity. Subject to the same rules of supply and demand that any other commodity is: A surplus of supply lowers its value, a shortage increases it. That's the whole "magic" behind money. Whether you use a natural shortage of the commodity money (as is the case with a gold standard) or whether you create an artificial shortage of the commodity money (by not printing more than t
Re: (Score:2)
You are aware that you can actually replace gold with bitcoins in your sentence, yes? And we've seen just how well that went down.
Any "rare" commodity shares the problem of fiat money: It's only valuable as long as someone is willing to part with something he owns in exchange for it. Money is just a commodity, nothing else. Its value comes from people's desire to have it. Whether you use gold for that, bitcoins, cowries or sheets of cotton with some numbers, faces and funny squiggly lines, what matters is t
Re: long overdue (Score:2)
That's not a mainstream definition of inflation. For example Wikipedia says "inflation is an increase in the general price level of goods and services in an economy"
What you're talking about is monetary inflation. And the whole point of the fractional reserve system is to attempt to match monetary inflation with increased economic activity and maintain a low price inflation through supply and demand, while indirectly managing wage inflation through unemployment.
The problem with treating monetary inflation a
"Laying off employees turns out to be infectious," (Score:2)
Recent hires (Score:2)
I've read a number of articles saying these were mainly recent hires, primarily from the surge of hiring most all the big tech companies did during and after COVID. It was at that time that remote work (and, well, remote everything) became a huge thing and the tech companies were all tripping over themselves to win over that new market share (everything from remote education to exercise). Most of that glut of new employees didn't even have anything specific to work on - it was just excess spending using th
Market Reset (Score:2)
The economy saw unsustainable growth for a few years and now we're back to a more normal situation. Industries that hired big during those years are now trying to shed those jobs.
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Unskilled, unnecessary workers (Score:2)
Giant corporations hired like mad during the pandemic, to stupid levels. They hired lots of people right out of college, or anyone with a pulse, and put them on siloed work just in case they found a use for them - here, you put the dots on the 'i's, you put the line breaks in the web pages.
Now with that massive infusion of pandemic cash over and fears of a recession, they're laying off those hundred of thousands of unskilled, unneeded workers.
If you have actual tech skills you will have NO problem finding
Corellation? (Score:2)
How many were roughly around the time of stock but-backs?
Odd layoffs, oddly coordinated (Score:3)
This round of layoffs is odd for a lot of reasons:
I'm sure that big companies need to cut the cruft occasionally, in order to remain competitive. The rise in interest rates may have provided an impetus. However, one also suspects a lot of "lemming" behavior: One C-suite exec rattles on about streamlining, and their C-suite buddies don't want to be outdone. Also, Covid and WFH have given workers a feeling of power. C-Suite execs certainly don't want to feel like they're losing control, so this may partially be an attempt to scare employees back into blind compliance.
Notable, of course, is the lack of any C-suite level downsizing or reduction in bonuses. To the contrary, expect to see next year's bonuses increase, based on cost-savings and streamlining. /s
Re: Odd layoffs, oddly coordinated (Score:2)
"widely coordinated across many big tech companies. This is not a coincidence"
Don't underestimate the groupthink of the valley.
Re: (Score:3)
There's nothing odd about it. Addressing your points is as simple as it is obvious:
First, the companies are doing just fine, most with $billions in net profits.
All the companies firing people are the ones who over hired. Look at the likes of Facebook who announced not one but two rounds of staff cuts, after the end of which they will still finish the year with a larger number of staff than they started with.
Second, it is widely coordinated across many big tech companies. This is not a coincidence...
No it's
I think people just haven't seen it before (Score:2)
Some don't grasp this concept (Score:5, Interesting)
I've noticed my girlfriend's family can't seem to understand this. Her dad worked for Ford his whole life. She works in analytical chemistry. I work in software. Whenever discussing job prospects for me, they always ask what companies I'm going to apply to. And I have to tell them "probably some companies you and I have never heard of; I'm not restricting my job search."
Meanwhile, I had to convince my girlfriend to expand her job search after she lost her job. She applied to like half a dozen pharmaceutical places in our area and then felt like she had exhausted the job market. I had to remind her that it's not just pharma companies who hire chemists. There's also the manufacturing and energy sectors, who aren't laying people off post-pandemic. And food services. And probably a bunch of other stuff outside my wheelhouse.
We are not company men. We are skilled labor. Like a plumber or electrician. We don't need to wait for job creators.
Seen this before (Score:2)
It was called the mid-1990s, when CEOs downsized until Wall St. stopped regarding them for doing so, never mind the long-term health (that is, 1 yr plus) of the company.
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/0... [nytimes.com]
Re: (Score:2)
See also: Precision Schedule Railroading as a reason to lay off people, increasing profits while hauling less freight.
Return to the Industrial Age - Again? (Score:2)
I find myself wondering about a return to when "tech firms" were infrastructure and the rest of the industrial/commercial/govt world rolled their own using that. Timesharing (see: cloud computing in principle) was a thing back then, for organizations that couldn't afford the up-front cost of their own computers or wanted more flexibility. The old rent-vs-buy calculation. With the cloud, we're back in the renting space for more than just infrastructure, but really consulting was always a thing; it's just tha