The U.S. economy is booming. So why are tech companies laying off workers? | Washington Post
The U.S. economy is booming. So why are tech companies laying off workers? | Washington Post
SAN FRANCISCO - The first time Julian Chavez got laid off from his job as a digital ad sales rep at web.com didn’t turn him off from the tech industry. Neither did the second time when he was laid off from ZipRecruiter. By the third time, though, Chavez had had enough. “I really loved what I did,” s...
The first time Julian Chavez got laid off from his job as a digital ad sales rep at web.com didn’t turn him off from the tech industry. Neither did the second time when he was laid off from ZipRecruiter. By the third time, though, Chavez had had enough.
“I really loved what I did,” said Phoenix-based Chavez in a text message. “But the layoffs got me jaded.” Now he’s pursuing a graduate degree in psychology.
Chavez is one of hundreds of thousands of tech workers who’ve been laid off in the past two years in what now seems like a never-ending wave of cuts that has upended the culture of Silicon Valley and the expectations of those who work at some of America’s richest and most powerful companies.
Last year, tech companies laid off more than 260,000 workers according to layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi, cuts that executives mostly blamed on “over-hiring” during the pandemic and high interest rates making it harder to invest in new business ventures. But as those layoffs have dragged into 2024 despite stabilizing interest rates and a booming job market in other industries, the tech workforce is feeling despondent and confused.
The U.S. economy added 353,000 jobs in January, a huge boost that was around twice what economists had expected. And yet, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Discord, Salesforce and eBay all made significant cuts in January, and the layoffs don’t seem to be abating. On Tuesday, PayPal said in a letter to workers it would cut another 2,500 employees or about 9 percent of its workforce.
The continued cuts come as companies are under pressure from investors to improve their bottom lines. Wall Street’s sell-off of tech stocks in 2022 pushed companies to win back investors by focusing on increasing profits, and firing some of the tens of thousands of workers hired to meet the pandemic boom in consumer tech spending. With many tech companies laying off workers, cutting employees no longer signaled weakness. Now, executives are looking for more places where they can squeeze more work out of fewer people.
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Work in tech, I’m so fucking overworked lately that it’s massively cut down my productivity.
I can’t keep jumping from short deadline high priority to short deadline high priority and still do the baseline work needed to be efficient. So what ends up happening is I’m doing way more throw away work now than I ever have.
If I had more staff on my team we could balance the work out and get stable foundations to work from, but that doesn’t let leadership pretend we’re all better off now than a year ago and that the institutional failings of the org are all solved because they expertly threw the right people in the trash via randomly firing people.
I have a friend who's in exactly your same position, and a spouse who was randomly fired away from a team run by someone in exactly your same position. It's eerie how consistent and systemic these problems are across the entire sector.
Since Covid I think the tech CEOs only talk to other tech CEOs, VCs demanding their payout, and their EAs.
The CEO bubble was so clearly visible with NFTs and now AI.
Yeah it’s abundantly clear they don’t just chat with their subordinates or customers or even just have middle class hobbies.
it's not that they don't chat with them, they just feel they are above the rest and thus have insider knowledge/understanding.
Ask any big company CEO, they will talk about it as if it's proven fact when they talk out their ass about anything
How does that work when everyone is remote?
"Since Covid" is also basically when interest rates increased.
It's the exact position I'm in as well. Short deadline high priority projects without the staff needed to actually get it done.
I just got fired for this exact reason: too many tickets in the queue and all of them highest priority. And I'm not talking about stuff that you can do in 10 minutes.
That sucks so much, and I'm sorry you had to go through that. My spouse got fired for "failing to prioritize", which is corporate speak for exactly the same thing. Meanwhile she spent almost 2 years telling her boss she needed more help to get everything done, and they refused to give her a direct report. So when they told her to "delegate better", she simply responded with, "who the fuck am I supposed to delegate to?" It'd be hilarious if it weren't so sad.
Hope you get back on your feet soon. It's a jungle out there right now.
Yep, same thing here. Some dude was supposed to be my help but he was redirected to do some hardware support stuff on premises and completely disappeared between customers... So yeah whatever, I have two months of garden leave and I'm already relaxed like I wasn't in two years (yeah on vacation I got emails and calls about problems that could have been solved by that dude if he read the wiki... with the result that I was never on vacation but always on edge).
I was in this a few years back at a dotcom: too many tickets.
I'd have weekly meets with my boss where I just said "order these, and understand the bottom third may never get done".
And I'd confirm the ordering in email so it was written down.
It helped when someone would ask "hey what's with the Penske File" and I could say "Marty said I have this other stuff to do first. Sorry man."
It kept me alive longer than two of my peers, anyway. But I eventually left because Marty was a challenge to work with and life's too short to get blindsided.
I just got fired for this exact reason: too many tickets in the queue
Wouldnt too many tickets in the queue mean the company needs.. more people?? Not less??? How do they Ever plan to get the tickets completed with less people????
“I mark them Urgent A, urgent B, urgent C… urgent D you don’t even really have to worry about”
https://youtu.be/UqGe9TOmnyE?si=Uk1TVNr9H2E4gcWQ
I’m sorry to hear you got fired. Falling behind tickets is a failure of management not staff. If there’s too much work then you’re not scheduling enough workers
As Soon As Possible means I can take my time as everything else has a date.
Ha ha ha ! If it's not possible, then it's not soon!
My buddy was working in a well-known purveyor of fruit-named products. His boss and entire team was canned around him and he was a team of one reporting to his former skip.
That didn't last long. A few months of Herculean effort wasn't enough to keep ahead of the arbitrary workload and he was done too.
That has happened to me.
I’m currently running what was a team of three that all got fired and I got told to take over the whole thing alone.
Edit: they fired the whole team, then noticed they needed the output the team produced.
So what ends up happening is I’m doing way more throw away work now than I ever have.
so fucking true
we need to move quickly, just do it and we'll come back and refactor later
let's spend more time writing shit that will 100% change just so we can meet a fuckin date. Give me a fuckin break.
refactor later
And you know they mean "rewrite" because they haven't nailed down a spec by hack time.
This is why experienced (software) engineers are different from coders: they'll balk at the waste if their job isn't at stake. (If it is, you talk to your skip, right?)