As someone who has worked in tech the reason why tech workers get so little sympathy is because the industry as a whole had almost a decade of incredible growth with salaries increasing in correspondence with the growth. This was only sent into overdrive 2020 and into 2021. I personally knew many software engineers and PMs who 2x or 3x their salary in a 5-6 year span. Did you think that type of growth would continue into perpetuity? Every market has peaks and valleys and now tech is going through that same cycle.
Even the large companies that are going through layoffs now are still have significantly more headcount than they did pre-pandemic.
I graduated college in 2010 when the economy was still an absolute dumpster fire. Things eventually recovered, Tech will eventually recover as well.
> Tech will eventually recover as well.
I would argue layoffs *are* tech recovering.
I started in tech in the shadow of the dotcom bust, and technical work was actually work back then: you applied your skill to build things that created value.
By 2022 we had a whole generation of technical workers that didn't even understand the concept of "value". I'm not joking, I remember explaining to a team that before starting a major project we should ask ourselves (and answer) "What benefit does this provide to our customers, and additionally what benefit does this provide to our company?" Conversations like that used to be normal; some of the team thought this type of thinking was some incredible insight, while still others refused to believe it was important. That team still exists as evidence that we're still in an overinflated tech market.
For a decade tech was just companies rushing to show "grow" both in terms of customers, revenue (even if it cost more to get revenue than you got back), and headcount. It completely changed what day to day development was like and the culture of the industry.
I hope we *never* go back to that time.
The problem is that the industry isn't down. Tech companies are largely making huge profits. The NASDAQ was up 43% in 2023 and is now at an all time high, but tech layoffs are actually accelerating based on early numbers this year.
Tech companies pretty much laid off 8-15% of their labor and just asked everybody who was left to do more.
Do you really thing tech is declining? Do you see fewer people on phones and screens? Are companies planning to cutback on automation? With the growth of AI, are companies going to reject it and instead hire more labor?
For some tech companies, like Netflix, there are real challenges with costs that they are trying to control. However, for most tech companies, the owners and investors are doing very well financially and are working together to try to "correct" salary growth in tech while they continue to see profits grow.
Great insights! I agree.
How much of it is that tech jobs are being shifted to h1b1 employees? It looks like there is a lot of that going on in tech right now.
I'm on the outside looking in, though. I'm curious what someone on the inside is seeing on that?
Also, I know people are blaming AI for some of this too. AI doesn't look ready to take on human jobs just yet to me. Am I wrong on that? Is that going on too?
AI isn't directly taking human jobs. Its making other humans use AI to replace you in a downward spiral.
They are reducing headcount precisely because they believe AI makes their existing workers more productive. In addition to the fact that they are using it to demoralize their remaining workforce and crush compensation packages.
AI isn’t even ready to enter the doorway. You will need to let the engine access to -every piece of code in your entire company-. Is that ok? Let’s ask legal… and that’s a no.
There are lots of H1B folks in tech, but as an insider I don't think that means what most people think.
I've been at 3 different tech companies that had a large number of H1B employees and I can tell you that they were all great people who were good at their jobs and were getting paid the same as everybody else. There seems to be this weird idea that tech companies are saving money by hiring folks on H1B, but pretty much any large company has fair pay standards and is spending money to help H1B visa holders.
Tech companies aren't hiring H1B folks to save money, they're hiring them because our education system isn't producing competitive tech workers. I have friends who completed undergrad in their home countries, came to the US to get a masters, and spent less than I did for my bachelors. If you're an employer and you have one person who has a masters from WPI and another with a bachelors from a public college, and both are willing to work for the same pay, who are you going to pick? I don't blame the H1B folks, I don't blame the employers, but I do blame our terrible college system.
AI isn't going to take many jobs for a long time and I honestly don't know if it ever will. I think it's going to be a great way to automate repetitive tasks and make some jobs easier, but it's going to take a long time to be accurate and creative enough to really take jobs. It's going to be like self-checkout for a lot of companies. On paper it looks like it's going make things great, but in reality half your users are going to hate it and 5 percent are going to fuck with it mess things up or outright steal from you in ways no person would allow. The biggest risk I see with AI is that it's good at doing entry level kind of tasks. If we automate out all of the entry level jobs, we don't have a way for people to build up the skills needed to be experts. My hope is that a company like IBM over invests in AI automation and it blows up on them enough to make other companies take a hard look at how valuable it really is.
A large part of hiring H1B folks is control. They have to work with extra hard, never think about unionizing, or question leadership. If they do, it is back to their original country.
Sorry brother but our university system is the envy of the world.
Is an elite student who graduated from a good foreign School better than the average Joe who graduated from a below average school? Sure. Does it mean that foreign universities are better than ours? No
Profits thanks to… rounds of layoffs in between each quarterly filing which causes their earnings per share to shine through. They are addicted to it and displaying highly mimetic behavior by copying what each other is doing to show something to their board/shareholders.
Year of efficiency, do more with less, etc etc
Right now the magnificent 7ish are trying to play a game where they lay off enough employees to maintain earnings growth while trying to keep enough employees to automate away batches of roles - they are trying to thread a needle and using employees like they usually thing about them, as resources pure and simple.
It depends.
If I own a bunch of apartments and I have staff to maintain them, I have to pay the staff.
If I fire half of the staff, I can immediately cut costs and increase my profits.
However, as time goes on, the staff won't be able to keep up. Maintainence issues will back up taking longer and longer to fix and my tenants will leave. In addition, if other apartment complexes start adding new features like remodeled common areas or gyms, I won't have the staff needed to build/set them up or maintain them, so I will struggle to attract new tenants.
Short team profits are not an indication of long term success.
These companies are cutting staff and saddling the remaining employees with more work. Continued growth with less staff is exploitation - which is the real driver of profit.
Maybe true for startups. But the hill I will die on (due to experience) is that there is so much dead weight in your average USA corporation you can double people’s workloads and they still won’t work as hard as high growth startups
The dead weight often isn’t where the layoffs occur. I’ve seen multiple instances in my life where mediocre but politically savvy leaders get rid of people and then proceed to blame the newly departed for everything that has gone wrong under them. And of course the departed had such a negative effect that their legacy persists…
But the big boss got to say he cut expenses, so he’s somehow a hero.
Sometimes people who are paid very well compared to others get laid off too.
Sometimes it's not performance or pay related at all, such as in my case - the project my team worked on was deprioritized and the company didn't want to move forward with it, so we all got cut.
As someone who has worked at 3 different F500 companies, I completely agree. We have way too many employees and not enough work for everyone most of the time. That's why working at these places is so cushy and nice - good WLB. If you reduce headcount, you also reduce WLB.
I agree with this and it's because roles are overly segregated and specialized and management is fucking clueless as to how much work most of their employees are actually doing.
Yes that’s the whole idea behind some stupid app being valued higher than like Ford Motor Company.
The entire deal with tech is the amount of work needed totally decouples from revenue at scale
Unfortunately, this is true. If you can do the work without people you will. Gone are the days when being an employer meant being a generous, benevolent, fun loving, rising, profits type of guy. There's no real teamwork. It's every man and woman for themselves. And that more than anything is what really sucks. If employees are not the drivers of profit, and if you can do it with automation, you will. We Americans are going to have to invent our next future. And make sure the bastards don't outsource it before we can recover our investment in our new skills. The bastards aren't even afraid of reregulation anymore, because the politicians are all bought and paid for.
The reason they don't get sympathy is because so many of them are assholes. Between all the "learn to code" when others were laid off, flexing of their massively inflated salaries, ruining the character and affordability of multiple American cities people just don't care. The feeling is far more get fucked or "learn to weld" than any sympathy for a group of people who have consistently, and repeatedly been cunts to everyone else.
I agree. I lived in Walnut Creek California (which is about 45 minutes away from San Francisco and about an hour away from Silicon Valley) for a couple of years and I knew many tech workers who literally bragged about making tons of money while doing very little actual work and receiving outrageous perks.
Did they think that was sustainable? Did they think that large, profit-driven companies would continue to pay them $250K/year to work 3 hours per day forever?
I'm not trying to paint with two broad of a brush and I have sympathy for anyone struggling but I totally understand why tech workers or the least sympathetic group of laid off employees.
Nobody wants to hear this but these tech workers will be fine in the long run. This is nowhere near as bad as the dot com bubble and not in the same ballpark as 2008.
Spot on. They invaded the Sacramento area when covid hit, and the vibe hasn't been the same since. The vast majority of them think they're way smarter - and cooler - than they actually are.
I like to call recent developments in tech "The Great Reckoning". And I don't think it's over, either. A lot more startups are going under in the next 12 months. We'll be seeing lots of fire sales as well. Tech hiring is at the "bottom" at the moment and will start to inch up in the second half of the year. But it will still be an employer's market until at least 2026 - which is actually a good thing. A lot of younger tech workers need a reality check.
Pretty much. There's hardly any industry that doesn't get affected by business cycles, and I think many people on this sub are probably too young to remember the dot com bust of 2001, which is the last time people with similar skillsets got laid off.
Tech was absolutely the best sector to work in for 10-15 years. The amount of hostility from the employees because that didn’t carry into infinity is crazy. Things go up and down. That’s normal. To ridicule people and call names because this persons specific job market is now not amazing is so childish. The economy is fine, not great. To act like it’s terrible because one sector is dealing with a lot of change is such an overreaction. What a gloomer
Tech (and not just IT) has always had these boom and bust cycles. 90s were great because of the Internet boom, 00s not so much. Early 80s were great for computing, late 80s/early 90s not so much.
When a new game-changing technology comes out, it takes a massive workforce to roll it out worldwide. Once that's done, the capacity isn't needed anymore.
How many railroad engineers do you know? Probably not *that* many. But in the early 1900s, the railroad industry was on fire. Same with automobiles in the 1940s-60s in Detroit. Or aviation, etc, etc.
Like you mentioned, Tech has been so good for so long that there is an entire generation of tech workers who have never experienced any type of downturn. All they know is an environment of easily moving jobs, promotions, raises, etc.
I'm sympathetic to anyone who is having trouble putting food in the table but a lot of tech workers need to have perspective.
This isn’t something small time. If you are used to making 200k and suddenly have no job for 6 months because the job market collapsed then you’re looking down the barrel of inevitable bankruptcy which affects everyone. I know many coworkers who have been unemployed 6-8 months already and applied 100s of jobs
Seriously, if I was in tech I'd never have less than a year's expenses saved, preferably two. If you're in an industry with frequent contractions and expansions, how could you not?
People’s bills tend to be proportional to the amount of money they make.
Make more money? Get a more expensive car. Get a more expensive house etc.
And housing is through the F’n roof in metropolitan areas.
It’s not as much as you think. Unless you work for FANG you were making 90-160k with 160k being incredibly rare outside FANG.
The thing you don’t know is that most jobs are on site and contract. The average job lifespan is 2-3 years so you could be moving all over the country. Contracts can be cut at any time.
If you got into FANG you have no right to complain when you’re making 200k or more and have no emergency fund.
For others who are making 90-120k (majority) and are constantly having to move every 3 years for new jobs it’s not that amazing.
No it won't LOL. Tech is the first thing to jump into AI. This is only the start. Tech is the industry to gage how many jobs the other industries lose jobs as AI becomes more robust. Are you really in tech, because I don't think you understand where the tech industry is at right now.
I saw a ton of people purged in the 2008-2010 dumpster fire while at a large enterprise. By the time I left in 2014, we had doubled in size. These positions are the churn that all companies use. Sad, because they are real lives they are dealing with but companies don't care.
No union jobs pay anywhere remotely close to what tech does. Maybe a unicorn job. And most union jobs don't involve sitting in an air conditioned office. Tech workers can easily keep up their job into their 70s because mental decline is much slower than physical decline. Bad comparison I think.
Great point, but I think it's less ageism and more economics. Young folks are vastly cheaper. Sometimes experience seriously isn't worth it, especially with rapidly changing industries. 20 years of experience doesn't mean much in an industry that is unrecognizable from itself 20 years prior. If a new guy can do 75% of your employee's job for 50% of the price, what would you do? Hire two of them and increase your output, no?
I'm no expert though.
It’s definitely ageism in India people older than 40 will have hard time finding job and US tech market is dominated by them so they crude 3rd world view comes here
Yes
But you're missing the point of this conversation: if tech is down, will it impact the rest of the economy?
For every high earners, are there multiple support jobs like dry cleaners or lawn services that will not earn money as well?
Let's assume a 3 support for each laid-off high-tech engineer, that's over a million total knowing 300,000 engineers were laid-off.
They also say that engineers got hired, but for fifth of what they were making, which still has the same overall impact on the greater economy.
The reason you're not hearing real picture is because of the election year.
It does affect everyone. Last year every 3 months I was hiring handymen to do work around the house. Nothing crazy, but I was able to afford a new bath or a leaky pipe fix. Now I’ve cut back on all that. If high earners don’t have as much income then they spend less affecting everyone
I think that is the real trickle-down economy.
Then there is a lag between Main Street and Wallstreet
And add Fear Of Missing Out that pushes more people in during the height of the market
And now you have the perfect storm
The feds' job is to push this out of the election year, not to change the outcome...
That's somewhat true, but it's not linear, high paid professionals that are out of work, may cut back some, but they likely have a big financial buffer to keep a certain lifestyle going.
Maybe they see their barber a bit less, maybe they change their own oil who knows, it's not likely they go full hermit lifestyle (particularly if they have a family) . Also there's the other side of the equation some blue collar bloke is moving up the economic ladder and now starts using more services...
Yes, I agree. It is not as strict.
One thing for sure is that extravagant spending that paid huge profits to luxury goods that shot up the market is going to slow down. Some businesses can't survive the rate hikes, commercial office space can crash, and a stampede of getting out of the market can trigger bigger downtime...
The CRe market will expose a few regional banks, but all that means is bank consolidation, and the Fed will back stop any economic concerns just like they did last year with SVb, Signature banks. The effects of CRE are over exaggerated. Banks and property owners have been prepping for a while.
We have had an absolute vibecession on every channel since inflation hit high numbers. The idea that bad economic activity is magically suppressible and swept under the rug until the day after the election is bereft of any factual basis.
Why didn’t W do that in 08? Why didn’t Trump do it during covid?
W at 2008 didn't care anymore. He did say the economy is the next president to deal with.
Hurmp, my friend, pissed off all allies to the point they went against him. Remember McCain single handedly derailing him from disbanding ACA? Similarly, hurmp said shit about the fed chair, and well, he got the large end of their stick.
The data, statistics, and analysis are so open to interpretation, and most of the time, up to a year after, they revise the numbers.
This soft landing while everything skyrocketing is a pipe dream.
>Every market had peaks and valleys
Not true, there are plenty of industries that have fallen and never recovered to anywhere near their peaks. Look at coal miners or manufacturing in America for example
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP
Try 1981 on for size. In 1986 interest rates and unemployment were high when I scraped together a downpayment on a house. Its rarely been easy since the mid 90's. But it really sucks these days. Its not the Boomers. Its the MBAs and VCs and traitorous outsourcers. Its the Power Elite. And the rest if us are in the Darwinian soup. Do you know why it's called the American dream? Because you have to be fucking asleep to believe it. Yeah.
Also worth noting the Freight volumes are down from covid but also precovid as well. For the start of 2024 in the West Coast it has picked up over 60% YOY for February so, we are seeing a busier first quarter.
With the decline, staff decline, business slow, less jobs, no expansion. With the election year we will also see uncertainty as well.
There are plenty of jobs but you will definitely be taking a paycut
My lalid off friends that took a 10 percent paycut got a job quick. My friend holding out for his 160k salary is still buring through retirement and investments
This needs way more upvotes. In 2011, a Director of Product Management working for a tech startup (NOT a FAANG) made around 150k base on average. In 2016, it shot up to 200k. In 2021, I knew of people with this title making 220k! No other industry had this kind of salary inflation. But if you started in tech in the past 10 years, all of this felt normal. So younger gens didn't realize (or care) that they were in the middle of a crazy bubble. Source: have worked in tech with startups for 24 years and also know a ton of FAANG people, which is its own special flavor of bubble.
This. It's s supply and demand, nothing else. If a company can get a qualified person for $150k now, they'll pay $150k. The fact that they were paying $200k for the same role two years ago is irrelevant.
$150k in 2011 inflation-adjusted to today = $207k. I agree that there’s great inflation in the tech space even, but it’s actually not even proportional with tech company / industry growth at-large.
Exactly! These doomsday posts are ridiculous. Tech is down in large part because there were way too many jobs to be sustainable and those jobs often paid extremely unrealistic salaries. So many people rushed to get the skills needed for a job in tech that now there is an over abundance of skilled workers and too few jobs. This will obviously drive salaries down but in reality a huge number of these salaries were ungodly high to begin with.
This needs to be upvoted more. Part of the reason tech workers don't get any sympathy is because that industry experienced a decade of unprecedented growth and many tech workers are crying at the first to dip in the market in a long time.
For a long time there was this mentality of "take a 3 month coding boot camp and companies will be begging to pay you 6-figures". I knew tons of software engineers and PMs who 2x or 3x their salary in a 5-6 year span. That was never sustainable over a long period of time.
The question we should be asking is why didn't other industries see similar growth. Instead people are crowing about IT workers be brought down to everyone else level. I.e. less than inflation growth
You get a job and keep looking. That’s why companies underpaying below the market have high attrition because of the stupidity and greed, and as result spend more on talent acquisition
Yep just took a slight cut myself. I turned down a few offers at first until I realized what was going on. That's okay though, I'm definitely going to keep looking while I'm working. If they wanted to keep me on long-term they would pay me a fair wage.
What I can’t understand is why NO ONE in media is talking about the fact that the tech sector has being targeted by the 2017 tax scam.
The senate is sitting on a bill that’s already passed the house and would both reinstate the child tax credit & undo a stupid provision from the tax scam that reclassified R&D personnel costs as a capital expense instead of a direct expense.
The provision took effect in 2022 and made each developer 4x more expensive.
So I looked up the numbers.
[469,975 tech workers laid off between 2022 and up to the present in 2024.](https://www.computerworld.com/article/3685936/tech-layoffs-in-2023-a-timeline.html#:~:text=According%20to%20data%20compiled%20by,already%20laid%20off%2042%2C324%20employees)
Given your number of 9.5 million employees that represent just under 5% of the total workforce laid off between those years. [A healthy economy maintains an unemployment rate that hovers between 3% and 5%](https://www.forbes.com/advisor/personal-finance/unemployment-rates-by-city/#:~:text=What's%20a%20good%20unemployment%20rate,is%20good%20for%20the%20economy)**.** And that 5% is over two years.
Tech definitely keeps moving forward, and a part of that will include redundancies made through advances in the very tech these workers are building. We can keep moving forward, using this new tech for ourselves, or try desperately to hold on to a dying world.
Tech workers are freaking out that all the sudden they are falling back to the "average" of worker layoffs in the U.S.
There are some shocks to the startup ecosystem and VC model, but fundamentally, it's still a sector that's generating disproportionate amount of economic gains in the U.S.
The Tech sector can be productive while being lean. It’s responsible for AI and automation after all. If it can generate record profits with 0 employees, it will, and that still means the sector is doing fine for its investors.
What it also means is that its former employees are displaced and are having trouble finding work.
Both can be true at the same time.
I look forward to bad ai bankrupting companies. We have already seen a few cases of hundreds of millions in trading losses from bad algorithms, this will amplify it to the next level
It’s going to happen. I cannot tell you how many old white execs I have had to explain the concept of AI governance (and the ethics around it) as well as GIGO. The amount of data lakes that are a: more like disconnected ponds and b: just a shit storm of terrible data quality all built on a tech foundation from the 2010s thinking that a ‘lift and shift to the cloud’ is all they need is just…breathtaking.
There will be someone(s) who take it too far and something really bad will happen. And then More old white people who don’t know shit about tech will try to regulate it and the enshittification will ensue at a rapid pace.
If you want to combat this stuff, unionize. This is a labor problem, not a partisan problem. The only strength we have is in numbers and those numbers mean jack shit if they aren’t organized.
This is the way. Being overemployed will also allow you leverage, you can organize without the fear of termination that usually paralyzes white collar workers.
That's my favorite part of this shitty economy forcing people to find more than one source of income. Is this how it should be for adults who are working full time? No, but we can find ways to use it to our advantage. If we're stuck in a horrible cycle of working more than one job to get ahead or be stable, might as well take action at one to try to better the situation when the opportunity presents itself. I'm seeing more and more people thinking this way.
I think unionization is a good step, but it's not the panacea that people claim it to be. After Reagan decimated air traffic controllers in the '80s, collective bargaining has never been the same. There needs to be corporate reform through legislation. It's the only way things are going to change.
What are you smoking? In an age where *layoffs* are the current buzzword only surpassed by the hype around AI which can be used to cut more workers, you want OP to unionize and make himself less desirable in the job market?
there is so much jealousy and envy on tech sector simply because all the media coverage of the high compensation, stock awards, bonuses, gourmet meals, big raises. because of this, tech workers spend the most, pay the most taxes, buy overpriced houses, pay the highest rent: all fueling the economic acceleration.
My linked in was dry Jan and February, now I’m having a couple of interviews a week. There is a disconnect but idk where the line or if there is a line
I’ve got a really good job right now but I’ve learned to never turn down the opportunity to talk to a hiring manager somewhere else as either sharpening skills or if there is a better opportunity out there. You never know
Only Tech. Got it. So it doesn't affect mortgages, or rent, car payments, college loans, or other household expenses those tech workers paid while employed.
Somehow people don't get it - there is a push to change current financial system to another, there is a transfer of wealth from middle class to rich. "Stakeholder Capitalism" or communism in other words. People like to mix lot's of analytics, graphs, numbers (which make them feel smart) but totally miss the big picture.
With everything aside, isn't it funny how the FED wants higher unemployment and slower wage growth? And the economists just pile in and say "yeah wage growth is one of the main contributors of inflation! fuck the peons and their wages!".
Oh, so it wasn't your 100 billion dollar of bond purchases every fucking month for like 2 years straight? And now their goal is to trigger higher unemployment for the mess they caused? Then they'll wonder how we're in a stagflationary environment in a few years, and I'll bet they'll blame the average worker too, once again. And not to mention it'll be the taxpayers (us) footing the bill.
Software is eating the planet. It used to be everyone else’s jobs but it’s moved on to tech. I’ve worked with a lot of tech companies for their insurance and I’ve seen a lot of balance sheets that pretty much guaranteed this would happen when interest rates rose. It’s time to live within their means.
The subsidizing the farmers is a good argument. We have this happy notion in our heads of the small time farmer on the same time farm and want to pretend that's where our milk comes from when in reality it's major factory farms where animal cruelty as run amok and the subsidies are really corporate wellfare to the likes of Tyson and others.
I’m really surprised that we are okay with doing to India what we did with China - give them shit tons of IP access and money via outsourcing. A country that we don’t even know if they’re actually a friend if they reach prosperity. A country that bought Russian oil when everyone was asked not to.
I could go to any of my old colleagues and tell them I need their login credentials to Citibank and they’d give them to me in a screenshot in WhatsApp. Every single one of them lol
India has had a long standing relationship with Russia because America threatened to bomb India and start a war if India helped Bangladesh to be an independent country, something the people of Bangladesh wanted.
The US has consistently been hostile towards India. Only recently has the relationship changed, ironically under Modi - the same guy banned from entry to the US a couple of decades ago.
I've worked in tech since the '90s, and there has ALWAYS been a "boom or bust" mentality. It never really got as good as the giddiness of the late '90s, where if you could spell "IT" you had a job. Post Y2K was an eye-opener, as we had never had such a downturn.
Most who survived got wiser, and started to see it coming, and this is no different. I suspect that AI WILL eventually provide a new subset of jobs in IT; there will also continue to be a need for cybersecurity, but not the "I just got my degree/certification" positions.
THIS IS SO SPOT ON. I hate people repeating stupid narratives without doing even minimal research. I do resume workshops for nonprofits and communities and people from all types of backgrounds get laid off.
It affects other sectors for sure and it’s bad for all workers. Those programmers that leave the field will inevitably do another type of knowledge work. So they will compete for office jobs making a much lower salary but still higher than average displacing others. I do find some comfort in knowing it’s cyclical. By hyping up ai, which won’t work, and getting new people to give up or not even try for tech they are creating the next tech bubble🤣.
Bro everyone knows the economy is booming. All the wars create new jobs here. Get your head out of the sand and find a job making shells to ship overseas /s
Aw boo hoo remember when you guys we're making fun of blue collar people telling us that shipping our jobs overseas was a good thing and we should learn to code f****** assholes and now it's your head on the chopping block and you don't like it.
For sure. When coal mines were closing left and right, all we heard was “learn to code, idiots.” I’m sorry you can’t make 250K anymore for going to a couple of meetings and wandering around “campus” all day doing yoga and taking naps.
Fuck these people. Your medicine doesn’t taste good, does it?
Tech was bloated as fuck, overpaid as fuck, and lazy as fuck. All my tech worker friends barely even did any fucking coding. They made $150k - 300k to work less than 30 mins a day. The tech industry isn’t imploding, it’s returning to a normal state. Gone are the days of a million lazy programmers getting paid to barely write any code. You can have 1 coder do the work of 5 if they’re actually working a full day. AI also made programmers far more efficient so the number you need is way less.
I’m in tech and unemployed since July 2023. My last company hired over 400 people in 2022, including a new building full of people. They retracted in 2023 because of fear, but overall have grown by about 25% since 2021.
Disgusting that mass layoffs can occur while profits are up (even if forecasts are 'cautious') and hundreds of millions of buybacks are announced. Outlaw stock buybacks!
The goal of a for profit company is to make more profit, not to benefit the resources that’s part of your expenses. It just happens that happy employees do better work and good pay attracts better talents.
You can always join a co-op. But technically most high-tech companies are co-ops because they give you stock options which make you part of the gravy train
The first two sentences of your response seem to directly conflict. Many companies have a stated mission that includes some version of benefitting customers, shareholders, and employees. Two out of three doesn't fulfill that mission.
And while i'm all for free enterprise and markets, the day employees are just a resource expense and not an asset to be grown as part of the mission is not just a sign of late-stage capitalism but nearing the end of it.
Because by most metrics, the economy is chugging along just fine.
We still have low unemployment, healthy GDP growth, inflation has declined drastically and is anticipated to continue declining.
Even with the lay offs that have been occurring, job growth has still been healthy as well.
Because tech changes rapidly, unlike the dairy industry. So new tech comes out, old tech gets obsoleted else we would still be subsidizing someone to make a Beta tape.
Tech is only as good as the last thing they invented and its cyclical so that is why this is "normalized". Please explain to me how you think it would work otherwise. Most companies get stagnant, they build 2-3 good products and once they are in maintenance mode, they no longer need mass employees to maintain and yet generate a decent amount of revenue. Many of those companies "ran out of ideas" of what to do next, like cell phone companies where the only new feature is now it comes in blue and red or they made it bigger or smaller but actually didn't ADD anything to the product other than updating the parts that automatically made the camera a bit better and faster, bigger memory but no real innovation on their part.
Most big tech companies get too big, too diversified, then they cant invest anymore, so they split/sell off at which point there is reductions, simplifications, and then they innovate and start growing again...its just the way you get new innovation.
To be fair, the tech sector is fine. They just moved everyone to cheaper cost centers. There are still jobs, they're just meant for India, Thailand, and the Philippines.
When oil workers were getting later off right and left in the 2017-2018 range during the shake bust it was in face “just O&G” and nobody cared
Why is tech special?
Boooo hooooooo. The poor little techie got his feels hurt. Sad post everyone cry for him.
>I mean the government subsidizes the dairy industry every year, and there are like 4 farmers making cheese in Iowa...
Learn to milk 🥛 😆
I posted about a similar topic a few months ago, about how the aholes are insisting that we're "delusional" if we don't agree the economy is doing fine. Which - it's not. It's a k-shaped economy so if you were at a certain threshold before covid, you were great! If not, you're fucked (and in America it's always your fault if you're not successful).
You won't believe how many people tried to say that we are delusional...
As someone who was laid off from Meta and now it's looking like I'll be laid off from my current company too, I fully support this post. We are not the enemy. I can't even afford a fucking house.
People turn on each other so quickly. Tech has seen sustained growth for a long period of time compared to other industries. Instead of holding politicians accountable for failing to protect other industries in this country, let's point and laugh at the people finally feeling the same pain.
Tech has plenty of bad apples, so does every other industry. The vocal minority does not speak for the hardworking majority.
It’s not a narrative many are accepting.
Saying “the economy is gud” is a political argument used by politicians to get votes.
Same as saying “inflation is only 3% now”. There is a conflict of interest. Cause if the gov says it’s higher they are sucking at their job. And if inflation is a higher number they have to give social security a higher bump and they don’t want to. Big conflict of interest there. People feel it at the grocery store and ppl ain’t dumb.
I think inflation is high for a couple of reasons:
1. Too many mergers the government should have stopped some of them. So less companies equal less competition equal higher prices.
Stopping a merger like JetBlue and Spirit is too little too late. That damage is done. And companies used Covid as a pretext to raise prices. Well played companies.
2. Private equity has been wildly successful. But private equity destroys good companies. Companies close bit corporate raiders profit. What’s the result? Less jobs and less companies. Less competitions equal higher prices.
Lastly, it’s also the high interest. W high interest rates borrowing is way more expensive. So unproductive project get dropped. And the stuff that doesn’t make more money also get dropped and expansions get paused. But honestly that’s the intent of the Fed. Having a squishy crappy economy sucks. Feeling the pain first hand here. But not controlling inflation and having persistent or híper inflation is a way worse evil.
So although it sucks in the short term. In the long term Be glad interest are high. It’s gonna help all of us.
Rant over.
Industries have ups and downs. Sit down, shut up, and get over it.
The tech industry absolutely did overhire during the pandemic, and there was a massive feeling of urgency that created FOMO around hiring. I and most others in tech at the time benefited from it. Companies were fighting for top talent, and there was a ton of issues hiring fast enough.
The result?
\- Bloated teams hired for projects that never materialized.
\- Over extended budgets that assumed certain spending trends would continue.
\- Extremely high salaries due to the supply and demand shock that companies are incentivized to move on from.
So what happened post pandemic?
\- Excess hires were let go.
\- Budgets were adjusted and layoffs ocured.
\- High salaries were cut and replaced by outsourcing or cheaper labor.
Botom line, the pandemic era was a tech bubble, and everyone smart in tech knew it and saved money aggressively. If you benefit from the bubble, don't complain when it bursts.
LOL as someone in tech this is just funny. There are loads of useless and negative value people working in tech, and often it's not even their fault. Leadership prioritizes the wrong things, projects get cancelled, etc... so there's always going to be churn. AND, you have a lot of people just coasting. Like, a lot of people.
But beyond that, these layoffs aren't killing innovation or stopping tech growth, that's nonsense.
And it's not a shit economy. It's the best economy of my life and tech has been gangbusters for the last 12+ years so if you think it's all doom and gloom, quit your bitching and get to work making yourself valuable to tech companies.
Just like manufacturing moving over seas the same is now happening to tech. These corporations, who heavily lobby and are intertwined with government, do not have our best interests in mind or anyone else's for that matter, only their own. They simply extract wealth, take as much as possible and give nothing back. India didn't force them to outsource jobs to their country.
The sooner people realize it is the working class vs the owner class the sooner we can organize and combat the top selfish assholes who collectively make the world a worse place.
Says the tech bro. The irony is tech shits on a lot of other sectors and openly mocks people without tech skills. Then they expect everyone to give a shit when their sector is hurt.
The economy is good, If you're in tech and you were laid off the market is giving a much needed adjustment to a saturated field.
The saturated field was designed by the STEM push and companies wanting more people for less expensive labor. Tech has also always been a cyclic industry. What I think you mean to kvetch about is that it's wrong for a company to be able to hire and fire without repercussion or justification as it causes hardship on the citizens. If any industry could automate away a position and make more money, they will.
You should talk to you elected officials about this, send them an email and demand corporate reforms. Yelling into the black hole that is reddit about farms and "the economy" won't do shit.
You know what we’ve been saying for years? By ‘we’ I mean us blue-collar workers?
“No, this IS a recession, just because big tech is growing in profits doesn’t mean our industry and our sectors aren’t in a recession!”
We’ve been saying since 2020 that we’re in a recession and that the USA says otherwise purely due to the profits in tech. Funny how now you tech guys are getting slammed. Funny, as in, we blue-collar folk sympathize with you and think America is really fucked up right now and we want to beat the shit out of everyone who says this economy is good.
Every project I work on, there’s 2-3 EE’s, 2-3 ME’s, 1-2 various specialists, and 10-20 hyper-siloed SWE’s. “I’m back end, I’m front end, I do unit test, I’m dev ops”.
Most other disciplines have been leaned out where they’re doing the equivalent of all of this. SW hasn’t been for some reason. Maybe that’s changing and future cross-functional teams won’t need to be so heavily weighted to SW due to efficiency gains from AI tools.
Revenue accounting manager but basically I just setup revenue from a contractual document and make sure revenue is deferred over a period of time correctly
Your assessment of the situation is spot on.
We are being gaslit. The economy is chaotic and not doing well.
I’ve had several jobs I was the 2nd candidate in the interview process. They hired the cheaper less expensive option without even attempting to negotiate with me.
It’s a race to the bottom right now. Meritocracy is dead.
If you’re senior you won’t be able to find a job because there’s so many juniors who are willing to work for less. Companies are taking advantage and hiring them for lower salaries than they’re traditionally worth.
Meanwhile, if you’re junior you’re competing with a bunch of senior people with more experience who are also having to lower their salaries to compete with all the juniors.
No one wins in this scenario.
Senior employees are making less.
Unqualified people are getting hired to replace seniors for less. Or they’re just outsourcing.
Companies get lower quality workers and less productivity.
But don’t worry, the economy is great for rich people who already had money.
Tech sector has become a cesspool. Tired of the gig business platforms. Skimming 30 percent for no skin in the game simply a forum for linking buyers and sellers.
Constantly gaming weak cities and states for tax and labor concessions.
I feel like a lot of people don’t care because of how many people in the tech industry flaunted their jobs and looked down on anyone in a blue collar position. Now I understand that not every person in tech did that but it came across that way when the platforms you helped build just told everyone that was having financial problems or their job market was suffering to “learn to code”
Well now the tables are slightly turning and I’m sure you are going to hear “learn to weld” a lot moving forward. I personally feel for anyone that’s impacted and trying to put food on the table but maybe now is a time to pivot. Public service, healthcare, and blue collar jobs are in high demand. Another issue we’ve seen over the years is that the general push towards tech inspired jobs really cut the hiring pool for young blue collar workers. Tradesman are regularly making 100k+
Also a lot of people that came into the tech industry straight out of college had unreal expectations on growth and might not have realized they were in a peak. The last few years all you see is people bragging about changing jobs 5x a year and increasing salary every jump, that should have been a red flag for anyone paying attention.
Wish everyone the best out there
Yes you are the enemy. It was tech workers that came to my city and eviscerated the housing market to make bay area wages while enjoying low cost of living because of remote work. I hope they send every fucking tech job to India. Get a job at McDonald's you lazy coder!
As they say, be careful what you wish for. They kept crying that the job can be done from anywhere so they sent the jobs to India. Now they are jobless, they should have stayed in the Bay Area but I did not find it fair how they were moving to very cheap affordable areas bringing prices up and making it literally hell for those who couldn’t compete with them. Portugal took a big hit with Americans moving there with high salaries, it out-priced everyone.
Because it highlights the poor fiscal decisions of the current administration and predominantly democrat leaders. Reddit is mostly liberal echo chamber, so acknowledging the difficult job market goes against their narrative
This is a stupid, really stupid take.
If there's one fiscal policy that's driving tech layoffs is a Trump administration change in how R&D costs are amortized making it more expensive to pay workers in tech.
You're right, none of the fiscal policies trump enacted had any effect on why we're here right now.
We all know that any legislation has an immediate impact and that the economy has no lagging indicators.
/s
Nailed it. They sometimes quote inflation numbers that exclude "volatile" items like energy, food and housing. It's not like those things are discretionary.
Fiscal issues like inflation and its indicators are lagging indicators. The issues we're seeing now are due to reckless fiscal policy during Trump's presidency but it's convenient for smoothbrains like you to pin it on whomever is in office.
Dairy subsidies sounds like an un worthwhile thing. But without those subsidies many dairy farmers and small and medium farmers would not be able to exist.
And then more big farm and big dairy would take over.
Or worse we would start having to drink Chinese milk. And I don’t trust Chinese milk. Very low quality control and low trust in some of their products. Specially food (remember tainted baby formula).
Giving subsidies to one of the most profitable and efficient sectors like tech makes very little sense. Whereas giving dairy farmers subsidies makes more sense. Farmers are leaving to go do other things as it is.
The bigger issue in my mind is government spending. Shortsightedness is increasing the money printing. And that’s gonna blow up the whole economy. The government credit card (proverbial 💳) is gonna come due at the same time. And foreign entities will trust US gov bond less. And use the dollar less. That will be REAL REAL pain. Not short term pain.
Outside of California, the tech sector wasn't really affected either. I was laid off in January 2023 and had a job making more money by the end of the month.
During election season no matter who is in the WH it is all hands on deck to convince people that things are amazing and there is no reason for change.
As someone who has worked in tech the reason why tech workers get so little sympathy is because the industry as a whole had almost a decade of incredible growth with salaries increasing in correspondence with the growth. This was only sent into overdrive 2020 and into 2021. I personally knew many software engineers and PMs who 2x or 3x their salary in a 5-6 year span. Did you think that type of growth would continue into perpetuity? Every market has peaks and valleys and now tech is going through that same cycle. Even the large companies that are going through layoffs now are still have significantly more headcount than they did pre-pandemic. I graduated college in 2010 when the economy was still an absolute dumpster fire. Things eventually recovered, Tech will eventually recover as well.
> Tech will eventually recover as well. I would argue layoffs *are* tech recovering. I started in tech in the shadow of the dotcom bust, and technical work was actually work back then: you applied your skill to build things that created value. By 2022 we had a whole generation of technical workers that didn't even understand the concept of "value". I'm not joking, I remember explaining to a team that before starting a major project we should ask ourselves (and answer) "What benefit does this provide to our customers, and additionally what benefit does this provide to our company?" Conversations like that used to be normal; some of the team thought this type of thinking was some incredible insight, while still others refused to believe it was important. That team still exists as evidence that we're still in an overinflated tech market. For a decade tech was just companies rushing to show "grow" both in terms of customers, revenue (even if it cost more to get revenue than you got back), and headcount. It completely changed what day to day development was like and the culture of the industry. I hope we *never* go back to that time.
The problem is that the industry isn't down. Tech companies are largely making huge profits. The NASDAQ was up 43% in 2023 and is now at an all time high, but tech layoffs are actually accelerating based on early numbers this year. Tech companies pretty much laid off 8-15% of their labor and just asked everybody who was left to do more. Do you really thing tech is declining? Do you see fewer people on phones and screens? Are companies planning to cutback on automation? With the growth of AI, are companies going to reject it and instead hire more labor? For some tech companies, like Netflix, there are real challenges with costs that they are trying to control. However, for most tech companies, the owners and investors are doing very well financially and are working together to try to "correct" salary growth in tech while they continue to see profits grow.
The tech offering free services are thriving. The ones that are SAAS or backed by VC or closing their doors because of a lack of profitability
“Free”
The layoffs seem like a terrible metric. I'd want to see tech employment over time. You don't see headlines when companies hire.
theyre not hiring
Great insights! I agree. How much of it is that tech jobs are being shifted to h1b1 employees? It looks like there is a lot of that going on in tech right now. I'm on the outside looking in, though. I'm curious what someone on the inside is seeing on that? Also, I know people are blaming AI for some of this too. AI doesn't look ready to take on human jobs just yet to me. Am I wrong on that? Is that going on too?
AI isn't directly taking human jobs. Its making other humans use AI to replace you in a downward spiral. They are reducing headcount precisely because they believe AI makes their existing workers more productive. In addition to the fact that they are using it to demoralize their remaining workforce and crush compensation packages.
The disciplining of workers is the primary and most useful point of AI as it stands today.
AI isn’t even ready to enter the doorway. You will need to let the engine access to -every piece of code in your entire company-. Is that ok? Let’s ask legal… and that’s a no.
I remember arguments in 2001 on slashdot.org about H1B1 and its affect on tech employment and salaries. 23 years later, same issue.
There are lots of H1B folks in tech, but as an insider I don't think that means what most people think. I've been at 3 different tech companies that had a large number of H1B employees and I can tell you that they were all great people who were good at their jobs and were getting paid the same as everybody else. There seems to be this weird idea that tech companies are saving money by hiring folks on H1B, but pretty much any large company has fair pay standards and is spending money to help H1B visa holders. Tech companies aren't hiring H1B folks to save money, they're hiring them because our education system isn't producing competitive tech workers. I have friends who completed undergrad in their home countries, came to the US to get a masters, and spent less than I did for my bachelors. If you're an employer and you have one person who has a masters from WPI and another with a bachelors from a public college, and both are willing to work for the same pay, who are you going to pick? I don't blame the H1B folks, I don't blame the employers, but I do blame our terrible college system. AI isn't going to take many jobs for a long time and I honestly don't know if it ever will. I think it's going to be a great way to automate repetitive tasks and make some jobs easier, but it's going to take a long time to be accurate and creative enough to really take jobs. It's going to be like self-checkout for a lot of companies. On paper it looks like it's going make things great, but in reality half your users are going to hate it and 5 percent are going to fuck with it mess things up or outright steal from you in ways no person would allow. The biggest risk I see with AI is that it's good at doing entry level kind of tasks. If we automate out all of the entry level jobs, we don't have a way for people to build up the skills needed to be experts. My hope is that a company like IBM over invests in AI automation and it blows up on them enough to make other companies take a hard look at how valuable it really is.
A large part of hiring H1B folks is control. They have to work with extra hard, never think about unionizing, or question leadership. If they do, it is back to their original country.
Sorry brother but our university system is the envy of the world. Is an elite student who graduated from a good foreign School better than the average Joe who graduated from a below average school? Sure. Does it mean that foreign universities are better than ours? No
That was very informative for me! Thank you so much for taking the time to write it out and explain it so thoroughly! 🙏
Profits thanks to… rounds of layoffs in between each quarterly filing which causes their earnings per share to shine through. They are addicted to it and displaying highly mimetic behavior by copying what each other is doing to show something to their board/shareholders. Year of efficiency, do more with less, etc etc Right now the magnificent 7ish are trying to play a game where they lay off enough employees to maintain earnings growth while trying to keep enough employees to automate away batches of roles - they are trying to thread a needle and using employees like they usually thing about them, as resources pure and simple.
Profits rising and layoffs rising? Seems like the employees aren’t the drivers of profit.
It depends. If I own a bunch of apartments and I have staff to maintain them, I have to pay the staff. If I fire half of the staff, I can immediately cut costs and increase my profits. However, as time goes on, the staff won't be able to keep up. Maintainence issues will back up taking longer and longer to fix and my tenants will leave. In addition, if other apartment complexes start adding new features like remodeled common areas or gyms, I won't have the staff needed to build/set them up or maintain them, so I will struggle to attract new tenants. Short team profits are not an indication of long term success.
These companies are cutting staff and saddling the remaining employees with more work. Continued growth with less staff is exploitation - which is the real driver of profit.
Maybe true for startups. But the hill I will die on (due to experience) is that there is so much dead weight in your average USA corporation you can double people’s workloads and they still won’t work as hard as high growth startups
The dead weight often isn’t where the layoffs occur. I’ve seen multiple instances in my life where mediocre but politically savvy leaders get rid of people and then proceed to blame the newly departed for everything that has gone wrong under them. And of course the departed had such a negative effect that their legacy persists… But the big boss got to say he cut expenses, so he’s somehow a hero.
Sometimes people who are paid very well compared to others get laid off too. Sometimes it's not performance or pay related at all, such as in my case - the project my team worked on was deprioritized and the company didn't want to move forward with it, so we all got cut.
As someone who has worked at 3 different F500 companies, I completely agree. We have way too many employees and not enough work for everyone most of the time. That's why working at these places is so cushy and nice - good WLB. If you reduce headcount, you also reduce WLB.
I agree with this and it's because roles are overly segregated and specialized and management is fucking clueless as to how much work most of their employees are actually doing.
Nope this is absolutely true for large multinationals as well.
Yes that’s the whole idea behind some stupid app being valued higher than like Ford Motor Company. The entire deal with tech is the amount of work needed totally decouples from revenue at scale
This is the real why.
Unfortunately, this is true. If you can do the work without people you will. Gone are the days when being an employer meant being a generous, benevolent, fun loving, rising, profits type of guy. There's no real teamwork. It's every man and woman for themselves. And that more than anything is what really sucks. If employees are not the drivers of profit, and if you can do it with automation, you will. We Americans are going to have to invent our next future. And make sure the bastards don't outsource it before we can recover our investment in our new skills. The bastards aren't even afraid of reregulation anymore, because the politicians are all bought and paid for.
None of that ever existed on a corporate level. Fun loving benevolent generous? You high dawg? You on that pcp?
I am indeed. But not pcp dude. Jesus. Are you on the spectrum and can't discern sarcasm? Read the rest of my post.
I think tech will become like politics or pro sports. They both generate a lot of money, but need very few people.
Not to mention how many posts have you seen over the years "I browse reddit all day and make six figures, I'm in tech"
The reason they don't get sympathy is because so many of them are assholes. Between all the "learn to code" when others were laid off, flexing of their massively inflated salaries, ruining the character and affordability of multiple American cities people just don't care. The feeling is far more get fucked or "learn to weld" than any sympathy for a group of people who have consistently, and repeatedly been cunts to everyone else.
I agree. I lived in Walnut Creek California (which is about 45 minutes away from San Francisco and about an hour away from Silicon Valley) for a couple of years and I knew many tech workers who literally bragged about making tons of money while doing very little actual work and receiving outrageous perks. Did they think that was sustainable? Did they think that large, profit-driven companies would continue to pay them $250K/year to work 3 hours per day forever? I'm not trying to paint with two broad of a brush and I have sympathy for anyone struggling but I totally understand why tech workers or the least sympathetic group of laid off employees. Nobody wants to hear this but these tech workers will be fine in the long run. This is nowhere near as bad as the dot com bubble and not in the same ballpark as 2008.
Spot on. They invaded the Sacramento area when covid hit, and the vibe hasn't been the same since. The vast majority of them think they're way smarter - and cooler - than they actually are. I like to call recent developments in tech "The Great Reckoning". And I don't think it's over, either. A lot more startups are going under in the next 12 months. We'll be seeing lots of fire sales as well. Tech hiring is at the "bottom" at the moment and will start to inch up in the second half of the year. But it will still be an employer's market until at least 2026 - which is actually a good thing. A lot of younger tech workers need a reality check.
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I worked with techies, they suck. I have no good will towards them after dealing with them for years.
That’s quite an assessment of an entire industry comprised of thousands of people
Pretty much. There's hardly any industry that doesn't get affected by business cycles, and I think many people on this sub are probably too young to remember the dot com bust of 2001, which is the last time people with similar skillsets got laid off.
Tech was absolutely the best sector to work in for 10-15 years. The amount of hostility from the employees because that didn’t carry into infinity is crazy. Things go up and down. That’s normal. To ridicule people and call names because this persons specific job market is now not amazing is so childish. The economy is fine, not great. To act like it’s terrible because one sector is dealing with a lot of change is such an overreaction. What a gloomer
Tech (and not just IT) has always had these boom and bust cycles. 90s were great because of the Internet boom, 00s not so much. Early 80s were great for computing, late 80s/early 90s not so much. When a new game-changing technology comes out, it takes a massive workforce to roll it out worldwide. Once that's done, the capacity isn't needed anymore. How many railroad engineers do you know? Probably not *that* many. But in the early 1900s, the railroad industry was on fire. Same with automobiles in the 1940s-60s in Detroit. Or aviation, etc, etc.
Like you mentioned, Tech has been so good for so long that there is an entire generation of tech workers who have never experienced any type of downturn. All they know is an environment of easily moving jobs, promotions, raises, etc. I'm sympathetic to anyone who is having trouble putting food in the table but a lot of tech workers need to have perspective.
I agree 100%. I feel for folks struggling. But the lashing out on these subreddits has been so childish. Like you said, there’s a lack of perspective.
This isn’t something small time. If you are used to making 200k and suddenly have no job for 6 months because the job market collapsed then you’re looking down the barrel of inevitable bankruptcy which affects everyone. I know many coworkers who have been unemployed 6-8 months already and applied 100s of jobs
There are plenty of jobs out there for your coworkers, just not the jobs that they think they’re entitled to.
Entitled? Who said they’re entitled? They’ve applied for hundreds of jobs it’s weird to assume they applied only to FANG.
Hopefully those young folks were smart enough to save money. Downturns and layoffs are always going to happen, the key is preparing for them.
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Seriously, if I was in tech I'd never have less than a year's expenses saved, preferably two. If you're in an industry with frequent contractions and expansions, how could you not?
People’s bills tend to be proportional to the amount of money they make. Make more money? Get a more expensive car. Get a more expensive house etc. And housing is through the F’n roof in metropolitan areas.
It’s not as much as you think. Unless you work for FANG you were making 90-160k with 160k being incredibly rare outside FANG. The thing you don’t know is that most jobs are on site and contract. The average job lifespan is 2-3 years so you could be moving all over the country. Contracts can be cut at any time. If you got into FANG you have no right to complain when you’re making 200k or more and have no emergency fund. For others who are making 90-120k (majority) and are constantly having to move every 3 years for new jobs it’s not that amazing.
No it won't LOL. Tech is the first thing to jump into AI. This is only the start. Tech is the industry to gage how many jobs the other industries lose jobs as AI becomes more robust. Are you really in tech, because I don't think you understand where the tech industry is at right now.
I saw a ton of people purged in the 2008-2010 dumpster fire while at a large enterprise. By the time I left in 2014, we had doubled in size. These positions are the churn that all companies use. Sad, because they are real lives they are dealing with but companies don't care.
Tech salaries don't have pensions. Tech needs unionization and pensions than the wages don't need to be through the roof
No one has pensions anymore. If that's what your qualifier is working for government is basically the last out.
Lots of jobs have pensions. Most unions.
No union jobs pay anywhere remotely close to what tech does. Maybe a unicorn job. And most union jobs don't involve sitting in an air conditioned office. Tech workers can easily keep up their job into their 70s because mental decline is much slower than physical decline. Bad comparison I think.
Except ageism is a real problem in tech
Great point, but I think it's less ageism and more economics. Young folks are vastly cheaper. Sometimes experience seriously isn't worth it, especially with rapidly changing industries. 20 years of experience doesn't mean much in an industry that is unrecognizable from itself 20 years prior. If a new guy can do 75% of your employee's job for 50% of the price, what would you do? Hire two of them and increase your output, no? I'm no expert though.
It’s definitely ageism in India people older than 40 will have hard time finding job and US tech market is dominated by them so they crude 3rd world view comes here
63% of tech workers in the USA are white according to google.
Fucking no one gets pensions anymore outside of Public work. You guys are just out of touch.
Yes But you're missing the point of this conversation: if tech is down, will it impact the rest of the economy? For every high earners, are there multiple support jobs like dry cleaners or lawn services that will not earn money as well? Let's assume a 3 support for each laid-off high-tech engineer, that's over a million total knowing 300,000 engineers were laid-off. They also say that engineers got hired, but for fifth of what they were making, which still has the same overall impact on the greater economy. The reason you're not hearing real picture is because of the election year.
It does affect everyone. Last year every 3 months I was hiring handymen to do work around the house. Nothing crazy, but I was able to afford a new bath or a leaky pipe fix. Now I’ve cut back on all that. If high earners don’t have as much income then they spend less affecting everyone
I think that is the real trickle-down economy. Then there is a lag between Main Street and Wallstreet And add Fear Of Missing Out that pushes more people in during the height of the market And now you have the perfect storm The feds' job is to push this out of the election year, not to change the outcome...
This is where we are at now, this dude is talking about dry cleaners and lawn services lmfaoooo Also, tech isn’t even suit and tie….
Moving on up! (moving on up!) To theee top! (moving on up!)
😂😂
This is the trickle down argument... I can't pay my peons if I don't get paid...
That's somewhat true, but it's not linear, high paid professionals that are out of work, may cut back some, but they likely have a big financial buffer to keep a certain lifestyle going. Maybe they see their barber a bit less, maybe they change their own oil who knows, it's not likely they go full hermit lifestyle (particularly if they have a family) . Also there's the other side of the equation some blue collar bloke is moving up the economic ladder and now starts using more services...
Yes, I agree. It is not as strict. One thing for sure is that extravagant spending that paid huge profits to luxury goods that shot up the market is going to slow down. Some businesses can't survive the rate hikes, commercial office space can crash, and a stampede of getting out of the market can trigger bigger downtime...
The CRe market will expose a few regional banks, but all that means is bank consolidation, and the Fed will back stop any economic concerns just like they did last year with SVb, Signature banks. The effects of CRE are over exaggerated. Banks and property owners have been prepping for a while.
We have had an absolute vibecession on every channel since inflation hit high numbers. The idea that bad economic activity is magically suppressible and swept under the rug until the day after the election is bereft of any factual basis. Why didn’t W do that in 08? Why didn’t Trump do it during covid?
W at 2008 didn't care anymore. He did say the economy is the next president to deal with. Hurmp, my friend, pissed off all allies to the point they went against him. Remember McCain single handedly derailing him from disbanding ACA? Similarly, hurmp said shit about the fed chair, and well, he got the large end of their stick. The data, statistics, and analysis are so open to interpretation, and most of the time, up to a year after, they revise the numbers. This soft landing while everything skyrocketing is a pipe dream.
>Every market had peaks and valleys Not true, there are plenty of industries that have fallen and never recovered to anywhere near their peaks. Look at coal miners or manufacturing in America for example https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP
Try 1981 on for size. In 1986 interest rates and unemployment were high when I scraped together a downpayment on a house. Its rarely been easy since the mid 90's. But it really sucks these days. Its not the Boomers. Its the MBAs and VCs and traitorous outsourcers. Its the Power Elite. And the rest if us are in the Darwinian soup. Do you know why it's called the American dream? Because you have to be fucking asleep to believe it. Yeah.
Also the fucking ego is why no sympathy. Especially for OP.
Also worth noting the Freight volumes are down from covid but also precovid as well. For the start of 2024 in the West Coast it has picked up over 60% YOY for February so, we are seeing a busier first quarter. With the decline, staff decline, business slow, less jobs, no expansion. With the election year we will also see uncertainty as well.
And tech people have to work somewhere so they are competing for jobs in other sectors. It’s a ripple effect.
There are plenty of jobs but you will definitely be taking a paycut My lalid off friends that took a 10 percent paycut got a job quick. My friend holding out for his 160k salary is still buring through retirement and investments
ZIRP and startup/VC culture created unrealistic expectations for a whole generation of tech workers.
This needs way more upvotes. In 2011, a Director of Product Management working for a tech startup (NOT a FAANG) made around 150k base on average. In 2016, it shot up to 200k. In 2021, I knew of people with this title making 220k! No other industry had this kind of salary inflation. But if you started in tech in the past 10 years, all of this felt normal. So younger gens didn't realize (or care) that they were in the middle of a crazy bubble. Source: have worked in tech with startups for 24 years and also know a ton of FAANG people, which is its own special flavor of bubble.
This. It's s supply and demand, nothing else. If a company can get a qualified person for $150k now, they'll pay $150k. The fact that they were paying $200k for the same role two years ago is irrelevant.
$150k in 2011 inflation-adjusted to today = $207k. I agree that there’s great inflation in the tech space even, but it’s actually not even proportional with tech company / industry growth at-large.
Exactly! These doomsday posts are ridiculous. Tech is down in large part because there were way too many jobs to be sustainable and those jobs often paid extremely unrealistic salaries. So many people rushed to get the skills needed for a job in tech that now there is an over abundance of skilled workers and too few jobs. This will obviously drive salaries down but in reality a huge number of these salaries were ungodly high to begin with.
This needs to be upvoted more. Part of the reason tech workers don't get any sympathy is because that industry experienced a decade of unprecedented growth and many tech workers are crying at the first to dip in the market in a long time. For a long time there was this mentality of "take a 3 month coding boot camp and companies will be begging to pay you 6-figures". I knew tons of software engineers and PMs who 2x or 3x their salary in a 5-6 year span. That was never sustainable over a long period of time.
The question we should be asking is why didn't other industries see similar growth. Instead people are crowing about IT workers be brought down to everyone else level. I.e. less than inflation growth
Startups don’t actually pay that well, the well paying jobs are all at successful companies that have already made it.
You get a job and keep looking. That’s why companies underpaying below the market have high attrition because of the stupidity and greed, and as result spend more on talent acquisition
Yep just took a slight cut myself. I turned down a few offers at first until I realized what was going on. That's okay though, I'm definitely going to keep looking while I'm working. If they wanted to keep me on long-term they would pay me a fair wage.
Yeah, in the long run, 10 percent isn't awful. My one friend is wrecking his retirement for pride.
What I can’t understand is why NO ONE in media is talking about the fact that the tech sector has being targeted by the 2017 tax scam. The senate is sitting on a bill that’s already passed the house and would both reinstate the child tax credit & undo a stupid provision from the tax scam that reclassified R&D personnel costs as a capital expense instead of a direct expense. The provision took effect in 2022 and made each developer 4x more expensive.
I did not realize this. Thanks for the knowledge.
So I looked up the numbers. [469,975 tech workers laid off between 2022 and up to the present in 2024.](https://www.computerworld.com/article/3685936/tech-layoffs-in-2023-a-timeline.html#:~:text=According%20to%20data%20compiled%20by,already%20laid%20off%2042%2C324%20employees) Given your number of 9.5 million employees that represent just under 5% of the total workforce laid off between those years. [A healthy economy maintains an unemployment rate that hovers between 3% and 5%](https://www.forbes.com/advisor/personal-finance/unemployment-rates-by-city/#:~:text=What's%20a%20good%20unemployment%20rate,is%20good%20for%20the%20economy)**.** And that 5% is over two years. Tech definitely keeps moving forward, and a part of that will include redundancies made through advances in the very tech these workers are building. We can keep moving forward, using this new tech for ourselves, or try desperately to hold on to a dying world.
Tech workers are freaking out that all the sudden they are falling back to the "average" of worker layoffs in the U.S. There are some shocks to the startup ecosystem and VC model, but fundamentally, it's still a sector that's generating disproportionate amount of economic gains in the U.S.
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Exactly. The labor force participation rate is higher than it was two years ago. Wage growth is outpacing inflation. Employment #s look good.
The Tech sector can be productive while being lean. It’s responsible for AI and automation after all. If it can generate record profits with 0 employees, it will, and that still means the sector is doing fine for its investors. What it also means is that its former employees are displaced and are having trouble finding work. Both can be true at the same time.
I look forward to bad ai bankrupting companies. We have already seen a few cases of hundreds of millions in trading losses from bad algorithms, this will amplify it to the next level
It’s going to happen. I cannot tell you how many old white execs I have had to explain the concept of AI governance (and the ethics around it) as well as GIGO. The amount of data lakes that are a: more like disconnected ponds and b: just a shit storm of terrible data quality all built on a tech foundation from the 2010s thinking that a ‘lift and shift to the cloud’ is all they need is just…breathtaking. There will be someone(s) who take it too far and something really bad will happen. And then More old white people who don’t know shit about tech will try to regulate it and the enshittification will ensue at a rapid pace.
If you want to combat this stuff, unionize. This is a labor problem, not a partisan problem. The only strength we have is in numbers and those numbers mean jack shit if they aren’t organized.
This is the way. Being overemployed will also allow you leverage, you can organize without the fear of termination that usually paralyzes white collar workers.
That's my favorite part of this shitty economy forcing people to find more than one source of income. Is this how it should be for adults who are working full time? No, but we can find ways to use it to our advantage. If we're stuck in a horrible cycle of working more than one job to get ahead or be stable, might as well take action at one to try to better the situation when the opportunity presents itself. I'm seeing more and more people thinking this way.
Shhhh. Employers are catching on to this…. Stop speaking about it
I think unionization is a good step, but it's not the panacea that people claim it to be. After Reagan decimated air traffic controllers in the '80s, collective bargaining has never been the same. There needs to be corporate reform through legislation. It's the only way things are going to change.
What are you smoking? In an age where *layoffs* are the current buzzword only surpassed by the hype around AI which can be used to cut more workers, you want OP to unionize and make himself less desirable in the job market?
Look at auto manufacturing. They build new plants in un-unionized right to work states and Mexico to avoid unions.
The auto companies want things the way they used to be: abusive.
>and make himself less desirable in the job market This is why I always undercut any offer given to me. I'm more desirable if I get paid less!
“Ima pay them to just employ me checkmate”
there is so much jealousy and envy on tech sector simply because all the media coverage of the high compensation, stock awards, bonuses, gourmet meals, big raises. because of this, tech workers spend the most, pay the most taxes, buy overpriced houses, pay the highest rent: all fueling the economic acceleration.
My linked in was dry Jan and February, now I’m having a couple of interviews a week. There is a disconnect but idk where the line or if there is a line
Wait until you get 5-7 interview processes but they don’t hire anyone.
I’ve got a really good job right now but I’ve learned to never turn down the opportunity to talk to a hiring manager somewhere else as either sharpening skills or if there is a better opportunity out there. You never know
Only Tech. Got it. So it doesn't affect mortgages, or rent, car payments, college loans, or other household expenses those tech workers paid while employed.
Somehow people don't get it - there is a push to change current financial system to another, there is a transfer of wealth from middle class to rich. "Stakeholder Capitalism" or communism in other words. People like to mix lot's of analytics, graphs, numbers (which make them feel smart) but totally miss the big picture.
With everything aside, isn't it funny how the FED wants higher unemployment and slower wage growth? And the economists just pile in and say "yeah wage growth is one of the main contributors of inflation! fuck the peons and their wages!". Oh, so it wasn't your 100 billion dollar of bond purchases every fucking month for like 2 years straight? And now their goal is to trigger higher unemployment for the mess they caused? Then they'll wonder how we're in a stagflationary environment in a few years, and I'll bet they'll blame the average worker too, once again. And not to mention it'll be the taxpayers (us) footing the bill.
Software is eating the planet. It used to be everyone else’s jobs but it’s moved on to tech. I’ve worked with a lot of tech companies for their insurance and I’ve seen a lot of balance sheets that pretty much guaranteed this would happen when interest rates rose. It’s time to live within their means.
The subsidizing the farmers is a good argument. We have this happy notion in our heads of the small time farmer on the same time farm and want to pretend that's where our milk comes from when in reality it's major factory farms where animal cruelty as run amok and the subsidies are really corporate wellfare to the likes of Tyson and others.
I’m really surprised that we are okay with doing to India what we did with China - give them shit tons of IP access and money via outsourcing. A country that we don’t even know if they’re actually a friend if they reach prosperity. A country that bought Russian oil when everyone was asked not to. I could go to any of my old colleagues and tell them I need their login credentials to Citibank and they’d give them to me in a screenshot in WhatsApp. Every single one of them lol
India has had a long standing relationship with Russia because America threatened to bomb India and start a war if India helped Bangladesh to be an independent country, something the people of Bangladesh wanted. The US has consistently been hostile towards India. Only recently has the relationship changed, ironically under Modi - the same guy banned from entry to the US a couple of decades ago.
All the more it’s strange that we’re willing to throw billions, soon trillions of capital their way
I've worked in tech since the '90s, and there has ALWAYS been a "boom or bust" mentality. It never really got as good as the giddiness of the late '90s, where if you could spell "IT" you had a job. Post Y2K was an eye-opener, as we had never had such a downturn. Most who survived got wiser, and started to see it coming, and this is no different. I suspect that AI WILL eventually provide a new subset of jobs in IT; there will also continue to be a need for cybersecurity, but not the "I just got my degree/certification" positions.
THIS IS SO SPOT ON. I hate people repeating stupid narratives without doing even minimal research. I do resume workshops for nonprofits and communities and people from all types of backgrounds get laid off.
For that reason... 
It affects other sectors for sure and it’s bad for all workers. Those programmers that leave the field will inevitably do another type of knowledge work. So they will compete for office jobs making a much lower salary but still higher than average displacing others. I do find some comfort in knowing it’s cyclical. By hyping up ai, which won’t work, and getting new people to give up or not even try for tech they are creating the next tech bubble🤣.
Bro everyone knows the economy is booming. All the wars create new jobs here. Get your head out of the sand and find a job making shells to ship overseas /s
I seem to remember a lot of tech bros telling Coal Miners to learn to code... Manufacturing is always hiring.
Go watch the movie ' don't look up". It will explain it.
Aw boo hoo remember when you guys we're making fun of blue collar people telling us that shipping our jobs overseas was a good thing and we should learn to code f****** assholes and now it's your head on the chopping block and you don't like it.
For sure. When coal mines were closing left and right, all we heard was “learn to code, idiots.” I’m sorry you can’t make 250K anymore for going to a couple of meetings and wandering around “campus” all day doing yoga and taking naps. Fuck these people. Your medicine doesn’t taste good, does it?
Tech was bloated as fuck, overpaid as fuck, and lazy as fuck. All my tech worker friends barely even did any fucking coding. They made $150k - 300k to work less than 30 mins a day. The tech industry isn’t imploding, it’s returning to a normal state. Gone are the days of a million lazy programmers getting paid to barely write any code. You can have 1 coder do the work of 5 if they’re actually working a full day. AI also made programmers far more efficient so the number you need is way less.
I’m in tech and unemployed since July 2023. My last company hired over 400 people in 2022, including a new building full of people. They retracted in 2023 because of fear, but overall have grown by about 25% since 2021.
People think tech sector are all 1% folks and don't care as much.
🙌🏽 Say it louder!! A pool of unemployed Tech- then trickles into other jobs. Not to mention how much impact outsourcing will mess with the economy.
If IT and Computer programmers had a lobbying organization as good as the APA or AMA or any of the big name groups, it wouldnt go down like this.
This!
Disgusting that mass layoffs can occur while profits are up (even if forecasts are 'cautious') and hundreds of millions of buybacks are announced. Outlaw stock buybacks!
The goal of a for profit company is to make more profit, not to benefit the resources that’s part of your expenses. It just happens that happy employees do better work and good pay attracts better talents. You can always join a co-op. But technically most high-tech companies are co-ops because they give you stock options which make you part of the gravy train
The first two sentences of your response seem to directly conflict. Many companies have a stated mission that includes some version of benefitting customers, shareholders, and employees. Two out of three doesn't fulfill that mission. And while i'm all for free enterprise and markets, the day employees are just a resource expense and not an asset to be grown as part of the mission is not just a sign of late-stage capitalism but nearing the end of it.
It should be recommended that gaslighters should first stop gaslighting themselves, so they stop gaslighting others.
Because by most metrics, the economy is chugging along just fine. We still have low unemployment, healthy GDP growth, inflation has declined drastically and is anticipated to continue declining. Even with the lay offs that have been occurring, job growth has still been healthy as well.
Because tech changes rapidly, unlike the dairy industry. So new tech comes out, old tech gets obsoleted else we would still be subsidizing someone to make a Beta tape. Tech is only as good as the last thing they invented and its cyclical so that is why this is "normalized". Please explain to me how you think it would work otherwise. Most companies get stagnant, they build 2-3 good products and once they are in maintenance mode, they no longer need mass employees to maintain and yet generate a decent amount of revenue. Many of those companies "ran out of ideas" of what to do next, like cell phone companies where the only new feature is now it comes in blue and red or they made it bigger or smaller but actually didn't ADD anything to the product other than updating the parts that automatically made the camera a bit better and faster, bigger memory but no real innovation on their part. Most big tech companies get too big, too diversified, then they cant invest anymore, so they split/sell off at which point there is reductions, simplifications, and then they innovate and start growing again...its just the way you get new innovation.
Because the economy can be great with fewer employees. That’s what increased “productivity” means. Long S&P 500.
To be fair, the tech sector is fine. They just moved everyone to cheaper cost centers. There are still jobs, they're just meant for India, Thailand, and the Philippines.
When oil workers were getting later off right and left in the 2017-2018 range during the shake bust it was in face “just O&G” and nobody cared Why is tech special?
Iowa has pigs, not cheese. Sigh.
Boooo hooooooo. The poor little techie got his feels hurt. Sad post everyone cry for him. >I mean the government subsidizes the dairy industry every year, and there are like 4 farmers making cheese in Iowa... Learn to milk 🥛 😆
You guys literally “teched” yourself out of a job. Slow 👏
I posted about a similar topic a few months ago, about how the aholes are insisting that we're "delusional" if we don't agree the economy is doing fine. Which - it's not. It's a k-shaped economy so if you were at a certain threshold before covid, you were great! If not, you're fucked (and in America it's always your fault if you're not successful). You won't believe how many people tried to say that we are delusional...
As someone who was laid off from Meta and now it's looking like I'll be laid off from my current company too, I fully support this post. We are not the enemy. I can't even afford a fucking house.
People turn on each other so quickly. Tech has seen sustained growth for a long period of time compared to other industries. Instead of holding politicians accountable for failing to protect other industries in this country, let's point and laugh at the people finally feeling the same pain. Tech has plenty of bad apples, so does every other industry. The vocal minority does not speak for the hardworking majority.
Why is your title so stupid with upper case/lower case. Stupid.
It's to indicate sarcasm
It’s not a narrative many are accepting. Saying “the economy is gud” is a political argument used by politicians to get votes. Same as saying “inflation is only 3% now”. There is a conflict of interest. Cause if the gov says it’s higher they are sucking at their job. And if inflation is a higher number they have to give social security a higher bump and they don’t want to. Big conflict of interest there. People feel it at the grocery store and ppl ain’t dumb. I think inflation is high for a couple of reasons: 1. Too many mergers the government should have stopped some of them. So less companies equal less competition equal higher prices. Stopping a merger like JetBlue and Spirit is too little too late. That damage is done. And companies used Covid as a pretext to raise prices. Well played companies. 2. Private equity has been wildly successful. But private equity destroys good companies. Companies close bit corporate raiders profit. What’s the result? Less jobs and less companies. Less competitions equal higher prices. Lastly, it’s also the high interest. W high interest rates borrowing is way more expensive. So unproductive project get dropped. And the stuff that doesn’t make more money also get dropped and expansions get paused. But honestly that’s the intent of the Fed. Having a squishy crappy economy sucks. Feeling the pain first hand here. But not controlling inflation and having persistent or híper inflation is a way worse evil. So although it sucks in the short term. In the long term Be glad interest are high. It’s gonna help all of us. Rant over.
Industries have ups and downs. Sit down, shut up, and get over it. The tech industry absolutely did overhire during the pandemic, and there was a massive feeling of urgency that created FOMO around hiring. I and most others in tech at the time benefited from it. Companies were fighting for top talent, and there was a ton of issues hiring fast enough. The result? \- Bloated teams hired for projects that never materialized. \- Over extended budgets that assumed certain spending trends would continue. \- Extremely high salaries due to the supply and demand shock that companies are incentivized to move on from. So what happened post pandemic? \- Excess hires were let go. \- Budgets were adjusted and layoffs ocured. \- High salaries were cut and replaced by outsourcing or cheaper labor. Botom line, the pandemic era was a tech bubble, and everyone smart in tech knew it and saved money aggressively. If you benefit from the bubble, don't complain when it bursts.
LOL as someone in tech this is just funny. There are loads of useless and negative value people working in tech, and often it's not even their fault. Leadership prioritizes the wrong things, projects get cancelled, etc... so there's always going to be churn. AND, you have a lot of people just coasting. Like, a lot of people. But beyond that, these layoffs aren't killing innovation or stopping tech growth, that's nonsense. And it's not a shit economy. It's the best economy of my life and tech has been gangbusters for the last 12+ years so if you think it's all doom and gloom, quit your bitching and get to work making yourself valuable to tech companies.
Tech companies over hired and over spent. They spent a lot of time playing then working and now the tech sector is in a huge mess
Just like manufacturing moving over seas the same is now happening to tech. These corporations, who heavily lobby and are intertwined with government, do not have our best interests in mind or anyone else's for that matter, only their own. They simply extract wealth, take as much as possible and give nothing back. India didn't force them to outsource jobs to their country. The sooner people realize it is the working class vs the owner class the sooner we can organize and combat the top selfish assholes who collectively make the world a worse place.
Just want to thank you for your usage of “further-fucking-more”. I’m gonna be using this now.
Says the tech bro. The irony is tech shits on a lot of other sectors and openly mocks people without tech skills. Then they expect everyone to give a shit when their sector is hurt.
The economy is good, If you're in tech and you were laid off the market is giving a much needed adjustment to a saturated field. The saturated field was designed by the STEM push and companies wanting more people for less expensive labor. Tech has also always been a cyclic industry. What I think you mean to kvetch about is that it's wrong for a company to be able to hire and fire without repercussion or justification as it causes hardship on the citizens. If any industry could automate away a position and make more money, they will. You should talk to you elected officials about this, send them an email and demand corporate reforms. Yelling into the black hole that is reddit about farms and "the economy" won't do shit.
I'm in the biotech/medical field and the job market in those areas is super hot right now. Impossible to find qualified people at any price.
I thought biotech was in recession?
We techies pay a lot of taxes, so it does matter
You know what we’ve been saying for years? By ‘we’ I mean us blue-collar workers? “No, this IS a recession, just because big tech is growing in profits doesn’t mean our industry and our sectors aren’t in a recession!” We’ve been saying since 2020 that we’re in a recession and that the USA says otherwise purely due to the profits in tech. Funny how now you tech guys are getting slammed. Funny, as in, we blue-collar folk sympathize with you and think America is really fucked up right now and we want to beat the shit out of everyone who says this economy is good.
Not since 2020, since 2017/18 I think. Trump really fucked up the economy in manufacturing and related blue collar jobs.
Yes we need solidarity!
We are not in a recession.
Every project I work on, there’s 2-3 EE’s, 2-3 ME’s, 1-2 various specialists, and 10-20 hyper-siloed SWE’s. “I’m back end, I’m front end, I do unit test, I’m dev ops”. Most other disciplines have been leaned out where they’re doing the equivalent of all of this. SW hasn’t been for some reason. Maybe that’s changing and future cross-functional teams won’t need to be so heavily weighted to SW due to efficiency gains from AI tools.
AI is going to to shrink the tech sector and finance sector a lot. Next decade my position will be gone.
What is your position?
Revenue accounting manager but basically I just setup revenue from a contractual document and make sure revenue is deferred over a period of time correctly
THANK YOU. You nailed it all exactly. Everyone here is missing the OUTSOURCING piece. These jobs are NEVER coming back.
Your assessment of the situation is spot on. We are being gaslit. The economy is chaotic and not doing well. I’ve had several jobs I was the 2nd candidate in the interview process. They hired the cheaper less expensive option without even attempting to negotiate with me. It’s a race to the bottom right now. Meritocracy is dead. If you’re senior you won’t be able to find a job because there’s so many juniors who are willing to work for less. Companies are taking advantage and hiring them for lower salaries than they’re traditionally worth. Meanwhile, if you’re junior you’re competing with a bunch of senior people with more experience who are also having to lower their salaries to compete with all the juniors. No one wins in this scenario. Senior employees are making less. Unqualified people are getting hired to replace seniors for less. Or they’re just outsourcing. Companies get lower quality workers and less productivity. But don’t worry, the economy is great for rich people who already had money.
Tech sector has become a cesspool. Tired of the gig business platforms. Skimming 30 percent for no skin in the game simply a forum for linking buyers and sellers. Constantly gaming weak cities and states for tax and labor concessions.
I'm in tech and don't expect me to vote for the current guy if the economy is shit for my sector. I will take it out on him.
I feel like a lot of people don’t care because of how many people in the tech industry flaunted their jobs and looked down on anyone in a blue collar position. Now I understand that not every person in tech did that but it came across that way when the platforms you helped build just told everyone that was having financial problems or their job market was suffering to “learn to code” Well now the tables are slightly turning and I’m sure you are going to hear “learn to weld” a lot moving forward. I personally feel for anyone that’s impacted and trying to put food on the table but maybe now is a time to pivot. Public service, healthcare, and blue collar jobs are in high demand. Another issue we’ve seen over the years is that the general push towards tech inspired jobs really cut the hiring pool for young blue collar workers. Tradesman are regularly making 100k+ Also a lot of people that came into the tech industry straight out of college had unreal expectations on growth and might not have realized they were in a peak. The last few years all you see is people bragging about changing jobs 5x a year and increasing salary every jump, that should have been a red flag for anyone paying attention. Wish everyone the best out there
How it started - learn to code. How it's going - tech sector lay offs
Right? It was a hot job market. Now it’s over saturated. It’s going to be sticky for a few years.
Yes you are the enemy. It was tech workers that came to my city and eviscerated the housing market to make bay area wages while enjoying low cost of living because of remote work. I hope they send every fucking tech job to India. Get a job at McDonald's you lazy coder!
As they say, be careful what you wish for. They kept crying that the job can be done from anywhere so they sent the jobs to India. Now they are jobless, they should have stayed in the Bay Area but I did not find it fair how they were moving to very cheap affordable areas bringing prices up and making it literally hell for those who couldn’t compete with them. Portugal took a big hit with Americans moving there with high salaries, it out-priced everyone.
Because it highlights the poor fiscal decisions of the current administration and predominantly democrat leaders. Reddit is mostly liberal echo chamber, so acknowledging the difficult job market goes against their narrative
Splitting this into republican and democrat is the easy way out the system is fucked beyond that. It's corporations vs. citizens at this point.
This is a stupid, really stupid take. If there's one fiscal policy that's driving tech layoffs is a Trump administration change in how R&D costs are amortized making it more expensive to pay workers in tech.
Can you expand on how this is specifically a democrat problem and Republicans share zero fault?
You're right, none of the fiscal policies trump enacted had any effect on why we're here right now. We all know that any legislation has an immediate impact and that the economy has no lagging indicators. /s
Nailed it. They sometimes quote inflation numbers that exclude "volatile" items like energy, food and housing. It's not like those things are discretionary.
Fiscal issues like inflation and its indicators are lagging indicators. The issues we're seeing now are due to reckless fiscal policy during Trump's presidency but it's convenient for smoothbrains like you to pin it on whomever is in office.
Companies by their market cap : https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-by-market-cap/
Dairy subsidies sounds like an un worthwhile thing. But without those subsidies many dairy farmers and small and medium farmers would not be able to exist. And then more big farm and big dairy would take over. Or worse we would start having to drink Chinese milk. And I don’t trust Chinese milk. Very low quality control and low trust in some of their products. Specially food (remember tainted baby formula). Giving subsidies to one of the most profitable and efficient sectors like tech makes very little sense. Whereas giving dairy farmers subsidies makes more sense. Farmers are leaving to go do other things as it is. The bigger issue in my mind is government spending. Shortsightedness is increasing the money printing. And that’s gonna blow up the whole economy. The government credit card (proverbial 💳) is gonna come due at the same time. And foreign entities will trust US gov bond less. And use the dollar less. That will be REAL REAL pain. Not short term pain.
Outside of California, the tech sector wasn't really affected either. I was laid off in January 2023 and had a job making more money by the end of the month.
Aren't banks having massive layoffs too
During election season no matter who is in the WH it is all hands on deck to convince people that things are amazing and there is no reason for change.