Nearly 25,000 tech workers were laid off in the first weeks of 2024. Why is that?
https:// www.npr.org /2024/01/28/1227326215/nearly-25-000-tech-workers-laid-off-in-the-first-weeks-of-2024-whats-going-on Nearly 25,000 tech workers were laid off in the first weeks of 2024. Why is that?
Nearly 25,000 tech workers were laid off in the first weeks of 2024. Why is that?::undefined
Could it be...greed?
86Americans corporations, greedy? No, surely you jest.
25"Helping their stock prices so there is no reason to stop ".
No reason to stop... :)
If you are the kind of person that thinks collecting money is the reason we exists here, I guess it's hard to see a reason to stop. Lols.
14Q1 profits. It happens to some extent every year between Thanksgiving and early February. It helps the books for Q1. 1rst earnings calls of the year mean more than they should.
13And when everyone is doing it it’s much easier to do..
Rinse & repeat
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You don't say
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Shulman adds: "They're getting away with it because everybody is doing it. And they're getting away with it because now it's the new normal," he said. "Workers are more comfortable with it, stock investors are appreciating it, and so I think we'll see it continue for some time."
ughh this makes my blood boil
yeah workers are "OK" with it, yeah, no, they're too fucking terrified they're next to do anything about it
hate this guy
64More like the workers aren't unionized and have no voice in the matter, amirite?
37well i mean yeah. but unionizing would be the thing to do about it. it's just hard because people are scared for their job and scared to be out of a job right now, so they don't want to take the risk. even though it's fairly obvious that it's a bigger risk not to...
12Many of us are contractors, which just means employees with no rights who you can lay off without an excuse.
8Unions can't stop layoffs - at best they can just change the order in which employees are laid off (First-in Last-out / seniority), I guess the process might make the company reconsider, but there's no direct intervention.
I'm a member of a union and went through layoffs.
I think it'd only change if unions had power on the board / guaranteed share ownership, etc. as is the case in Germany (board representation with workers' councils) and was proposed but rejected in Sweden (share ownership).
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There was massive over hiring near the end of covid. So now they are shedding again.
Everyone is cutting headcount, so everyone else is following along. Thinking this must be good we stay competitive.
It's a pretty US focused issue though, as in European countries you can't just fire someone like that. There's definitely more cautious hiring though.
21There was also a certain level of "denial of talent" competition among the tech giants. Hire any vaguely competent people event if practically useless so the competition doesn't get them. It works only if you have infinite money (as in 0 interest rates) which is not the case any more.
8There hasn’t been the same purge here in Europe. I think the US tech industry is very large, and covid saw demand surge, resulting in a lot of hiring. Demand slumped which led to this. We’re not seeing the same purge in other industries. Headcount just needs to normalise again, which I think won’t take much longer. Unfortunately there is a compounding factor: interest rates. Tech was propped up by free money. Without that, we might see larger structural issues in the industry. If companies start failing then we enter a new phase in the layoffs.
7Yeah very large at more at will employment so you can just Hoover up anyone and then see if you needed then later..
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As others stated a small portion of that was due to over-hiring, some to follow the layoff trend and some to make the earnings call look good.
But from what some experts are saying; there's also another factor, which is even worse.
There's a looming threat of a recession hitting in a few months (which is said to be a much bigger recession than the post-Covid one). And this recession will be tied to the Commercial Real-Estate Bubble.
They are saying that it will be like the 2009 Mortgage Crisis and will be very disruptive.
There's this theory that companies are reducing their headcount to prepare for this recession by reducing their expenses to the minimum. Which makes sense.
For the companies without savings that is a must but the ugly part is that you see big names with huge amounts of money in the bank laying off people as well.
Well, because they don't want to invest that money on the people, they will use all that money to buy smaller companies when the recession hits. All big tech with enough money in the bank is rooting for the recession to happen so they can buy everything for very cheap and grow even more.
20I don’t get how there’s any connection. Sure, it sucks to own commercial real estate, or be one of the service companies that grew up to support office work, but isn’t the whole problem being that tech and other large companies no longer want to pay for that? This should be a bonanza for tech companies, saving billions of dollars that formerly went toward renting office space. Why aren’t we expecting a tech company boom?
8The anticipation is not that it'll hurt the tech companies, but the economy as a whole. A generalized economic slowdown impacts everyone, even if you specifically benefited from it.
If I could tell you exactly how it'll unfold, I'd be using that to make a lot of money instead. It's not even certain that it will happen.
Commercial real estate was for a long time a roughly predictable investment, and profitable.
Now profitability is severely reduced because people, including tech companies, are cutting their usage.
If the market collapses, it's unclear how far down it'll drag the economy, so companies are bracing for it to be bad.4This is probably going to work out to be a global catastrophe.
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Do you have any more reading on how a looming recession is will mirror 2008?
3I think another thing that isn’t being talked about with these layoffs, which would call for more unionization and policy making, is that “AI” is taking over these jobs.
Also when companies merge, there are “redundant” employees. So like the recent Microsoft layoffs, those were going to happen.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Last year was, by all accounts, a bloodbath for the tech industry, with more than 260,000 jobs vanishing — the worst 12 months for Silicon Valley since the dot-com crash of the early 2000s.
Now in 2024, tech company workforces have largely returned to pre-pandemic levels, inflation is half of what it was this time last year and consumer confidence is rebounding.
Yet, in the first four weeks of this year, nearly 100 tech companies, including Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, TikTok and Salesforce have collectively let go of about 25,000 employees, according to layoffs.fyi, which tracks the technology sector.
All of the major tech companies conducting another wave of layoffs this year are sitting atop mountains of cash and are wildly profitable, so the job-shedding is far from a matter of necessity or survival.
Some smaller tech startups are running out of cash and facing fundraising struggles with the era of easy money now over, which has prompted workforce reductions.
If it appears as if an entire sector is experiencing a downward shift, Pfeffer argues, it takes the focus off of any single individual company — which provides cover for layoffs that are undertaken to make up for bad decisions that led to investments or strategies not paying off.
The original article contains 621 words, the summary contains 209 words. Saved 66%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
16WFH made some cool opportunity hires. You could access people in remote areas and pay less.
Market rev is uncertain at the moment. They all want their numbers to come in hot. When everyone else is laying off, so they get less scrutiny.
15How much of those were in office jobs versus work from home? I mean, with the whole back to office push, is your job safe in the office or more likely it's all been just more "cat playing with a mouse"?
8Because the economy is doing great.
6economyRich fuckwits' gambling money
6
Aggressive targets weren't hit so the c levels are harvesting skulls to unlock their full bonuses.
2Which is kinda ironic because all those targets are commitments between the C-levels and the board/shareholders. So if the C-levels can't meet their commitments, then they should be the first ones fired.
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well i mean yeah. but unionizing would w_the thing_ to do about it. it's just hard because people are scared for their job and scared to be out of a job right now, so they don't want to take the risk. even though it's fairly obvious that it's a bigger risk not to...
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2
Because they all hired way too many people right after the pandemic and are just realizing they fucked up.
-6That's not what the article says. The article is saying that was true last year that the hiring spree was over optimistic and needed correction. Now that is not the case, but there's a weird knock on effect where the market has rewarded this behavior companies keep tightening to continue being rewarded. And there's a heard mentality where if company A gets rewarded by the market for layoffs, company B faces scrutiny from major shareholders not to do the same.
I think the initial correction of layoffs kind of made sense a year ago, but this article makes me think there is something not cool happening as it keeps continuing.
20The "rewarding" theory is probably true. That's why so many people were hired to begin with. Boards were like "if we don't hire, we'll fall behind!" So they over-hired. Now they're like "we can easily hire more later. Fire these losers."
So you basically trained a ton of people on your internal systems and let them go? And you think randos will be able to pick up the slack when you need them in 12 months?
These companies are so dumb. Aren't they growth companies? Don't they have moonshots to work on or any good ideas for the future these people can contribute to? It's like they became big and lost the ability to innovate.
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People not returning to office.
-15Based on what?
6Execs threatening to fire people who don't return to office, then firing a bunch of people.
https://nypost.com/2024/01/27/lifestyle/remote-workers-more-likely-to-be-fired/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/02/return-office-mandates-2023-remote-work/
https://gizmodo.com/amazon-ceo-tells-workers-to-return-to-office-or-fired-1850783235
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