The first time Julian Chavez got laid off from his job as a digital ad sales rep at web.com didn’t turn him off from the tech industry. Neither did the second time when he was laid off from ZipRecruiter. By the third time, though, Chavez had had enough.
“I really loved what I did,” said Phoenix-based Chavez in a text message. “But the layoffs got me jaded.” Now he’s pursuing a graduate degree in psychology.
Chavez is one of hundreds of thousands of tech workers who’ve been laid off in the past two years in what now seems like a never-ending wave of cuts that has upended the culture of Silicon Valley and the expectations of those who work at some of America’s richest and most powerful companies.
Last year, tech companies laid off more than 260,000 workers according to layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi, cuts that executives mostly blamed on “over-hiring” during the pandemic and high interest rates making it harder to invest in new business ventures. But as those layoffs have dragged into 2024 despite stabilizing interest rates and a booming job market in other industries, the tech workforce is feeling despondent and confused.
The U.S. economy added 353,000 jobs in January, a huge boost that was around twice what economists had expected. And yet, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Discord, Salesforce and eBay all made significant cuts in January, and the layoffs don’t seem to be abating. On Tuesday, PayPal said in a letter to workers it would cut another 2,500 employees or about 9 percent of its workforce.
The continued cuts come as companies are under pressure from investors to improve their bottom lines. Wall Street’s sell-off of tech stocks in 2022 pushed companies to win back investors by focusing on increasing profits, and firing some of the tens of thousands of workers hired to meet the pandemic boom in consumer tech spending. With many tech companies laying off workers, cutting employees no longer signaled weakness. Now, executives are looking for more places where they can squeeze more work out of fewer people.
Maybe if the metrics say the economy is booming but nobody can afford anything, and we keep losing well paying jobs for slightly more lower paying jobs, maybe we need to reconsider how we’re defining ‘the economy.’
But maybe the capitalists who own news sources already know that.
We’ve selectively sampled like 5 metrics and carefully confused population averages with the median and can confidently say: yachts are more affordable. QED you’re wrong.
/s
You can only cut away so much before you hit bone. A company cannot be all profit and nothing else. But none of these investors care cause they get theirs.
This is capitalism. It doesn’t care where it comes from or how the money comes in. But b***h better have my money.
This is why the country is going to hell. It can’t even invest in infrastructure anymore because there’s no short term profit in it.
Welcome to our late stage capitalist nightmare.
If anyone wants to band their tribes together in the wastes of the Mojave waive a trans pride flag and we won’t shoot.
Explain the exempting of a trans flag. What relevance is that?
Waving a trans flag is a good way to prove you’re not a fascist, because Nazis are physically incapable of doing so.
Lol the economy.
When the economy is bad, we suffer and prices go up. When the economy is good, we suffer and prices go up.
Why should any of us give a single shit about the state of the economy when it only benefits the 1%
Because we all want the new G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip
But it comes out and gets bought up by resellers and a select lucky few regardless of whether the economy is good or bad.
I buy it when it’s on sale because they overestimated demand, or when someone is selling a used one at a lower price. Whether the economy is good or bad.
Why should I care about the economy?
Fk that! I want Maskatron, the bionic man nemesis who can wear different faces!!
It’s called the rule of 40, and it’s the metric that has tech executives acting like bipolar Chihuahuas. Grow, cut, expand, right-size, cross the chasm, reorg, polish the turd and cover the smell. If a tech company doesn’t hit their rule of 40, their stock suffers. If they do, the stock soars.
% growth year over year + % profit margin should be greater than 40. 20% growth and 20% profit margin, or 0% growth and 40% profit margin, it doesn’t make a difference.
That means if you have a 15% profit margin, your target growth is 25%. But if you only grow, say, 20%, you must make that 5% back by cutting COGS. Companies trying to grow will hire staff to build up sales and get more done. If the growth doesn’t hit its target, those new hires are probably cheaper than the experienced people. Time for layoffs and outsourcing the veterans.
But why 40?
That’s the fucking horror of it. There’s no particular reason. Some stock analyst at some point said that 40 is a magic number that good Saas companies hit and not hitting that number is a death knell. But the market is far too complex and variable to boil it down to one metric.
But then investors like a simple metric, because it means they can anticipate what the dead money day traders will think, and bet the trend rather than the stock. If you can anticipate the market, you can make money regardless of what it does.
And executives know the rule, and serve the shareholders. So they move heaven and earth to maintain the magic number, even if it means destroying the lives of fungible employees.
So the rule becomes the prophecy becomes the rule because the prophecy said the rule would be the prophecy and the people making money like having rules because it allows them to be prophetic.
It’s an ourobouros of bullshit, where the rich get to ride the snake as it turns, and the employees all eat shit and are in turn consumed to provide the motion.
ourobouros of bullshit
This is where I spat out my coffee.
but… why male models?
Come on man, I just told you.
20% looks too small, 60% might look too much like a bubble ready to burst.
Tech engineers need to unionize. Many probably feel guilty of even considering such things because the salaries are insane compared to other jobs, but it doesn’t matter. Being treated like shit is being treated like shit regardless of how much money you make.
The psychological abuse tech companies regularly push on engineers is unhealthy, and then the constant layoffs that literally play games with peoples’ lives just to make a family of yachts a little happier. It’s disgusting. Sad thing is, some tech workers may not even notice how far down the well they’ve traveled with the constant pressure the companies try to apply to their staff.
The constant goals of annual tech releases and huge profit gains were never sustainable. Tech bros think they’re being so “disruptive” but they’re just playing a grift with lipstick on at the expense of thousands upon thousands of lives that shouldn’t be as stressful as they are. All while creating mountains of ewaste to help push the planet towards being uninhabitable.
Am union. Can confirm better work-life balance, way more off time (47days) during which no one reaches out without justification, and no wildcat layoffs.
Pay is 15% low but the pension plan is kickass. And isn’t that what you want?
Our union contract says 100% remote. I hope that continues to be a valuable goal as contracts come up for renewal in 4 more years. Since our hiring has been primarily across the country for retiree replacement (no one quits, just retires), I’m confident in its continued enshrinement.
U.S. based employer?
Publicly traded companies are like a monkey with a gun. The gun has been going off a lot lately.
Don’t work for a publicly traded company. They’re not interested in you. If you want to “climb the corporate ladder”, sure. Go for it. Live that hell, baby.
I wonder if any of this is punitive for push-back on RTO or union efforts.
It’s almost just a function of business at this point. Since engineers aren’t unionized, companies have become lazily complacent to use layoffs and rehires as a mechanism to manage each quarter’s budget. It needs to stop.
firing your workers makes the green line go up
🤡 🌎
executives mostly blamed on “over-hiring” during the pandemic and high interest rates making it harder to invest in new business ventures
Don’t know why we need a whole article for this obvious answer.
well, it’s a lie. for one.
It’s not for the tech industry. The whole industry pretty much relied on cheap debt to function, and when that debt stopped being cheap, tech companies started struggle.
How so?
I don’t remember if it was Apple or Microsoft who started it, but the strategy is to hire more than you need and then fire the bottom performers = those who don’t suck enough corporate dick.
It’s a sign that these companies are too big.
Microsoft has about a quarter million employees… doing what? They have about 12 products. All of which have open source alternatives done by … 500-1000 people? Yes, sure they operate world wide and services are definitely needed both internally and externally, but come on, it seems kind of excessive doesn’t it?
Not to be a Microsoft apologist, but they have hundreds of product lines, and legacy products they still have to maintain like very old versions of Windows running ATMs and airplanes and industrial systems across the planet. They also have some consumer hardware lines, the video game arm, and so on.
That being said, they still manage to make Windows 11 something you pay for that is more noisy, unwanted-app-sideloading, in your face, naggy, and terrible with every release, so if # of employees is a metric for productivity, they will need to hire the entire planet to make W11 not a pile of junk.
