[HN Gopher] Tech companies are finally firing tech workers
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Tech companies are finally firing tech workers
Author : hotpotamus
Score : 18 points
Date : 2023-04-21 20:07 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vox.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vox.com)
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| It seems, meta aside, that if anything the bulk of the tech
| layoffs were in Q3/Q4 last year and started trailing off Q1/Q2
| this year. If anything, it seems like other industries are
| starting to go through this now.
|
| With that said, it wouldn't surprise me if things look much
| better next year. Companies are actually doing quite well despite
| the fear mongering.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| "So far this year, nearly 20 percent of the 170,000 tech company
| layoffs were software engineers, even though they made up roughly
| 14 percent of employees at these companies".
|
| Software engineer was the most often laid off job role at 19.3%,
| recruiter was second at 4.6%.
|
| Definitely goes against the sentiment I've seen expressed here
| that developers are mostly not being affected.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Developers are more than 14% or 20% of the salaries paid out.
| They are not being laid off at a rate that's consummate with
| their monetary cost
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Yes, I detect the same sentiment (and it seems like a pretty
| natural one given the general audience here), but it also seems
| useful to see some data regarding the situation.
| Jupe wrote:
| Huh. Not a mention of the impact of tax filing changes around
| R&D. Software development salaries can no longer be treated as
| expenses and are now treated (somewhat correctly) as depreciable
| expenses.
|
| Not sure this is a root cause, but it certainly must be on the
| minds of decision makers in tech companies (large and small).
| boringuser2 wrote:
| It seems pretty obvious that Elon Musk acted as ablative armor
| for tech company layoff criticism and stock devaluation and the
| confidence snowballed.
| boringuser2 wrote:
| Written by a very smarmy journalist imminently replaceable by the
| GPT-4 API.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| First of all, I take with a grain of salt any piece about
| Facebook or Meta from a traditional media company (Vox belongs to
| Comcast) because they compete for add revenue and historically
| Facebook has been better at it. Should be noted that Comcast also
| competes with Meta for engineering talent.
|
| > This represents a stark about-face for a company that, until
| recently, had been offering outrageous salaries and basically
| hoarding people in these highly sought-after technical positions.
|
| I'm not sure what's the narrative they are trying to push here
| with the ambiguous term "outrageous" when this comp was mostly
| tied up to... stock performance! It's good to remember that it's
| in Comcast's interest to see engineering compensation go down.
|
| Meta needed that talent if they were to be able to bring the
| Metaverse to market (wether it was a success or not). Think about
| the ground-breaking work by Occulus. The Quest is basically a 10x
| price reduction for VR hardware between 2010 and now.
|
| It's good to remember that most layoffs outside of Meta (who has
| been pivoting pretty hard) were "tech adjacent" positions [0] [1]
| [2] [3] [4]
|
| > "Additionally, Keum said that Elon Musk, who fired 80 percent
| of his staff but still has a (sort of) functioning product, has
| become a sort of inspiration for other tech CEOs, who see his
| extreme cuts as a way of making their more modest ones seem
| morally and culturally acceptable. Their stance? "Thank you, Elon
| Musk, for showing us that it can be done. And thank you Elon Musk
| for taking the blame," Keum said."
|
| Yeah... So far Twitter completely gave up it's API. Rumor has it
| they lacked the manpower to actually keep it running and it was a
| last-ditch attempt at getting rid of bots. Same bots who flocked
| to the platform after the layoffs started since people in charge
| of mitigating these were fired.
|
| Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot
| more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want
| any of it near their brand. Remember the Twitter Blue two days of
| spam? [5] [6]
|
| [0] https://interviewing.io/blog/2022-layoffs-engineers-vs-
| other...
|
| [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-24/tech-
| layo...
|
| [2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3690309/about-those-
| te...
|
| [3] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-
| releases/2023-03-0...
|
| [4] https://techreport.com/news/3493451/microsoft-layoffs-
| ethics...
|
| [5] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-
| advert...
|
| [6] https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/4/23438917/twitter-
| verifi...
| tr_user wrote:
| Article cites the twitter layoffs as setting the example that
| companies can be leaner, but I'm not sure why this journalist
| didn't ask if it's a good example or a bad one. From the tech
| side, seems like twitter's reliability problem is a big red flag
| for why you shouldn't do it.
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(page generated 2023-04-21 23:02 UTC)