Every day there’s more big job cuts at tech and games companies. I’ve not seen anything explaining why they all seam to be at once like this. Is it coincidence or is there something driving all the job cuts?
Big companies are inefficient at monitoring themselves and can have a lot of employees that aren’t contributing to the company’s health… it’d be nice if those were the folks laid off but it can also be difficult to determine who is valuable and who isn’t so usually the cuts try and target low performers but metrics are used that cut a lot of high performers… then you’re still in the hole and try more cuts.
This continues (obviously never affecting upper management) until the company collapses or you get lucky as hell.
A few things happened pretty quickly.
During the pandemic, tech profits soared which led to massive hiring sprees. For all the press about layoffs at the big guys, I think most still have more workers than they did pre-pandemic.
Interests rates soared. Before the pandemic interest rates were ludicrously low, in other words it cost almost nothing to borrow money. This made it easier to spend on long term or unclear projects where the hope seemed to be “get enough users, then you can monetize.” Once interest rates rose, those became incredibly expensive projects, so funding is now much more scarce. Companies are pulling back on bigger projects or, like reddit, trying to monetize them faster. Startups are also finding it harder, so fewer jobs.
And of course, AI. No one is quite sure how much that’ll change the game but some folks think most programmers will be replaceable, or at least 1 programmer will be able to do the work of several. So, rather than hire and go through everything severance etc might entail, I think a lot of companies are taking a wait and see approach and thus not hiring.
Are we great again yet?
I’m here to repeal and replace good things, and I’m all out of “replace”.
Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. AI had the potential to alleviate a lot of pressures of society, to free up much of our time spent doing tedious mindless tasks. We just need to make sure to use it for the benefit of the many rather than the profit of the few. I don’t want a union that wants to keep labor busy and well compensated, I want a union that keeps people safe, happy, and compensated properly
We’re like a century past innovation making our 40 hour work week into a 20 hour one
I fully believe we’ll get a standardized 60 hour work week before we get a 20 hour one. Hell, I’m pretty sure we’d relegalize slavery before we get a 20 hour work week. Your average American will bend over backwards for a chance to please “the boss” and actively rat on their colleagues for avoiding work because our cultural understanding of loyalty is functionally equivalent to boot licking.
Yeah, except there’s no way the owners would give up any of the profits for the betterment of society. Every technological improvement since the industrial revolution made productivity skyrocket, and yet the capitalists made sure working people were still hovering just above destitution. The only reason some of us have it better is because unions fought them, and that includes Luddites that would destroy the means of production.
I want to offer my perspective on the AI thing from the point of view of a senior individual contributor at a larger company. Management loves the idea, but there will be a lot of developers fixing auto-generated code full of bad practices and mysterious bugs at any company that tries to lean on it instead of good devs. A large language model has no concept of good or bad, and it has no logic. It’ll happily generate string-templated SQL queries that are ripe for SQL injection. I’ve had to fix this myself. Things get even worse when you have to deal with a shit language like Bash that is absolutely full of God awful footguns. Sometimes you have to use that wretched piece of trash language, and the scripts generated are horrific. Remember that time when Steam on Linux was effectively running
rm -rf /*on people’s systems? I’ve had to fix that same type of issue multiple times at my workplace.I think LLMs will genuinely transform parts of the software industry, but I absolutely do not think they’re going to stand in for competent developers in the near future. Maybe they can help junior developers who don’t have a good grasp on syntax and patterns and such. I’ve personally felt no need to use them, since I spend about 95% of my time on architecture, testing, and documentation.
Now, do the higher-ups think the way that I do? Absolutely not. I’ve had senior management ask me about how I’m using AI tooling, and they always seem so disappointed when I explain why I personally don’t feel the need for it and what I feel its weaknesses are. Bossman sees it as a way to magically multiply IC efficiency for nothing, so I absolutely agree that it’s likely playing a part in at least some of these layoffs.
I’m pretty excited about LLMs being force multipliers in our industry. GitHub’s Copilot has been pretty useful (at times). If I’m writing a little utility function and basically just write out the function signature, it’ll fill out the meat. Often makes little mistakes, but I just need to follow up with little tweaks and tests (that it’ll also often write).
It also seems to take context of my overall work at the time somehow and infers what I’ll do next occasionally, to my astonishment.
It’s absolutely not replacing me any time soon, but it sure can be helpful in saving me time and hassle.
Those little mistakes drove me nuts. By the end of my second day with copilot, I felt exhausted from looking at bad suggestions and then second guessing whether I was the idiot or copilot was. I just can’t. I’ll use ChatGPT for working through broad issues, catching arcane errors, explaining uncommented code, etc. but the only LLM whose code output doesn’t generally create a time cost for me is Cody.
So basically, once again, management has no concept of the work and processes involved in creating/improving [thing], but still want to throw in the latest and greatest [buzzword/tech-of-the-day], and then are flabbergasted why their devs/engineers/people who actually do the work tell them it’s a bad idea.
1 programmer will be able to do the work of several
This is true right now. If you know how to use AI tools, it’s not that hard to work 5-10x faster as a programmer than it used to be. You still have to know what you’re doing, but a lot of the grunt work and typing that used to comprise the job is now basically gone.
I have no idea, but I can’t possibly imagine that that’s having no impact on resource allocation and hiring / firing decisions.
Lol AI ain’t that good, bud.
Want to have a programming contest where speed is a factor?
I actually looked this up, and the studies seem to agree with you. That one says a 55% increase in speed, and another says 126%.
All I can really say is, I’d agree with the statement that a single 3-hour task isn’t real representative of the actual overall speedup, and my experience has been that it can be a lot more than that. It can’t replace the human who needs to understand the code and what needs to happen and what’s going wrong when it’s not working, but depending on what you’re doing it can be a huge augmentation.
What you’re missing is that 95% of programming projects fail, and it’s never because the programmer didn’t code fast enough.
Speed-up isn’t why I have a team instead of being a solo act.
There’s also the pure reality that, yeah, it’s easier today to get a project off the ground than ever before, and AI is good at that, but you know what AI is absolute shit at? Modifying ludicrously cumbersome, undocumented, brutally hacked together legacy code and addressing technical debt - the two most common tasks of most actual software engineers.
True.
Good thing most companies aren’t stuck with ludicrously cumbersome, undocumented, brutally hacked together legacy code bases. /s
I can’t even type that with a straight face.
the two most common tasks of most actual software engineers.
So true.
It’s Q1. Companies always push hard for Q1 profits above all else. There’s usually hiring freezes and cuts to maximize profits, come Q2, they’ll hire a bunch of people and the cycle will continue.
It’s an easy win for the balance sheet. Their products are still sellable, the services should be more or less unaffected (for the next few quarters), so they’ll continue to get the same revenue. But their costs just decreased, so they look more profitable.
It looks good on quarterly calls. It’s a good way to juice a stock.
Short-term profits in exchange for long-term damage!
Consolidations, changing business direction, lack of funds and projects, etc.
Overinvestment and strong labor demand led to very high salaries. Investors hate high salaries. Firing people they can replace at a discount now that supply is increasing
It’s this.
With inflation, everyone deserves a higher salary. And programmers are able to command it.
CEOs hate this, so they’re playing chicken.
They’ll all get fired and pull their golden parachute in the next three years, when the shit hits the fan because they decided they could get by without XYZ critical skill.
Then they’ll go to the next place and evangelize about how “you’ve got to invest in talent”.
And soon they’ll be surprised the employees are less and less loyal and blame it on the new generations.
One factor I haven’t seen mentioned is that because of rising interest rates, tech companies have had to shift from being focused on growth to actually turning a profit. Because of this, companies are having to shed employees because they over hired in anticipation of that continued growth. People are expensive so that’s an “easy” way to try to get the line closer to positive.
This is kind of a rough overview and I’m by no means an expert on economics. Just someone who works in tech and so has been following things closely.
It also takes time to realize the costs of shedding workforce, and by then you might have a different CEO. As long as it’s next quarter, it’s fine.
Michael Hudson, Jun. 2022: The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages
To Wall Street and its backers, the solution to any price inflation is to reduce wages and public social spending. The orthodox way to do this is to push the economy into recession in order to reduce hiring. Rising unemployment will oblige labor to compete for jobs that pay less and less as the economy slows.
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates in order to cause layoffs. The capitalist class wanted to enlarge the reserve army of labor so that workers would too worried about losing their jobs to demand raises.
‘You Are Gambling With People’s Lives’: Warren Rips Powell Over Job-Killing Rate Hikes
Which is ironic because one of the Fed’s chartered purposes is to maximize employment. I guess maximizing profits is more important, even though it’s not on the list.
Yup. From an article I linked to in another comment:
The Federal Reserve Board’s ostensible policy aim is to manage the money supply and bank credit in a way that maintains price stability. That usually means fighting inflation, which is blamed entirely on “too much employment,” euphemized as “too much money.” In Congress’s more progressive days, the Fed was charged with a second objective: to promote full employment. The problem is that full employment is supposed to be inflationary – and the way to fight inflation is to reduce employment, which is viewed simplistically as being determined by the supply of credit.
So in practice, one of the Fed’s two directives has to give. And hardly by surprise, the “full employment” aim is thrown overboard – if indeed it ever was taken seriously by the Fed’s managers.
This is a thing that sounds like some crazy uncle bullshit but it is actually completely true and non-controversial.
The scariest thing to a central banker when it comes to inflation is that wages might start to go up. When that happens the inflations is basically permanent.
People need to understand that the Federal Reserve is the cartel of the US private banks, and that they have captured the US Treasury as well, which is the US sovereign fiat money printer. Just look at the history of people in executive positions at the Treasury and the Fed. It’s a revolving door between those positions and the executive positions at major US banks and corporations.
Bitcoin solves this. Clear, unambiguous, unchanging monetary policy that doesn’t constantly increase the supply and take a portion of your dollar’s value to give to anybody else. It is not aligned with any country or even block of countries and is truly the first international currency in that sense. No politician or even national or supra-national government can force Bitcoin do do anything that isn’t part of its protocol because it’s so decentralized.
It has been running 24/7 365 for 15 years without a single major security issue in the protocol or a single hour of downtime. With lightning network upgrades, transactions confirm in under a second internationally with fees 1000x less than credit cards, often under a single cent.
It is accessible to anybody in the world with a cell phone and internet access, including the billions, with a B, who don’t have access to stable banking infrastructure or local currency. No credit checks, no needing six forms of ID, no overdraft fees, no bank holidays, no middlemen, no nonsense. And it does this with less electricity than you’d think, less than 1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewable sources as miners chase the cheapest electricity and the cheapest electricity is from renewables and over-provisioned grids.
It’s an election year in the midst of an onsetting recession, so shareholders want to consolidate. I think on top of that models are being sold as something that can replace certain task forces - normally there would be rehires, and there still will be but I think it will be after its seen that they aren’t ideal replacements.
It’s likely the election won’t take place until next year.
I actually think it’s just bandwagoning by a bunch of cowards.
We saw this same phenomenon early last year too: Facebook laid off a bunch of employees, then Apple announced the same, then Microsoft, then Google, then Salesforce, then the infamous Twitter layoffs.
I think big tech is so sensitive to negative press that they all just wait and lay off folks at the same time so no single company takes all the bad press.
It doesn’t even have to be Illuminati-level coordination, either. All it takes is for some exec at Tech Company B to see that Tech Company A is firing people. Then Tech Company B decides to clean house too. The cascade is just a bunch of morons deciding to hop on the “let’s fuck over our employees to help our balance sheet” train.
Definitely agree it’s not an Illuminati cabal meeting in hoods and masks.
But it’s not not that either - there’s lots of overlap on boards of directors and VCs invested in these companies. They’re in the same circles and probably play golf together. Or, they hang out on the tarmac before their Davos keynotes on saving the world.
I live in Silicon Valley and I’ve heard that there’s a WhatsApp group with a bunch of “big tech” CEOs and CTOs in it and they chat and share memes with each other 👀
It starts with C and ends with M and bringing it up will get the white tyrants crying to the pinkertons.
I can’t believe it’s not cum
Lol ok I’m sorry, is it cum?
Cum creates life, the other thing ends it
I cannot think of any other word that starts with c and ends with m. What is wrong with me
Communism
It can’t be that because that doesn’t make any sense as an answer
My thinking cap finally revealed it to be capitalism.
White tyrants is what I call cum too
It’s interest rates.
Loans are more expensive, but critically, so are eggs.
Tech workers like eggs, and see no reason to buy fewer, so they’re asking for more money, unionizing, or hopping jobs to increase their salaries.
Notice how the big players are releasing press releases each layoff? No attempt at secrecy. No payouts to NDA the laid off employees. It’s an intimidation tactic.
It’s working at the moment, but tech workers get over their job change discomfort fast when there’s a 100% raise on the table. The market rate vs curent pay gap just creates pressure to change jobs until they do, even if they’re scared.
And the shareholders are all fucked.
Every tech layoff is a lottery ticket toward a company ending event. And then every employee who leaves because they realize the company is incapable of loyalty. Then every worker who leaves because their suppressed wages aren’t keeping up with their expenses or hobbies. Another chance to end the company. Nobody knows which perl script is the lynchpin of their company, or which random person will leave with all knowledge of it.
The CEOs are positively aggressively collecting chances to bankrupt their shareholders.
But the CEO will get a nice payout next quarter. So that’s nice.
eggs?
Weirdly, my first thought was eggs as in trans people who don’t know it yet. I really didn’t expect eggs in the literal meaning in that sentence…
Is that a real metaphor that people use? I’ve never heard of it referring to trans people before. But that’s not my community.
Yes it is. For example, /r/egg_irl was a fairly popular subreddit.
Yeah! We use it to lovingly refer to those of us who haven’t come out to ourselves yet. Their shells haven’t cracked yet.
The memes out of egg_irl are pretty fire if queer memes are your thing
The memes out of egg_irl are pretty fire if queer memes are your thing
I’m a cis-(mostly)het guy and absolutely agree. I get a special kind of joy from people discovering themselves and being accepted.
I read it as an allusion to the price of everything going up. But yes, eggs.
eggs?
Eggs.
Eggs.
Spam.
Eggs, eggs, spam.
Eggs.
There are laws around how layoffs have to be communicated. Secret layoffs at large companies aren’t a thing.
NDA’s occur at the start of employment. When someone is laid off, there is typically a severance that includes a separation agreement, these may have an NDA clause.
The rest of this I agree with. This is being pushed by the shareholders. The scare tactic is an added bonus.
Unionize.
Every tech layoff is a lottery ticket toward a company ending event. And then every employee who leaves because they realize the company is incapable of loyalty. Then every worker who leaves because their suppressed wages aren’t keeping up with their expenses or hobbies. Another chance to end the company. Nobody knows which perl script is the lynchpin of their company, or which random person will leave with all knowledge of it.
Plus, as this happens the first/second/third time to new employees, they lose any sense of company-loyalty they might have had at their first job. The next time anything goes wrong, these people are already writing applications, and then quitting the moment they get an offer somewhere.
This behavior by company trains people to associate fuck all with their current job. Which is a good attitude as a worker, but usually not something a company would have wanted, historically. A privately held company would usually want to aim for high worker loyalty, allowing them to endure bad market times without immediately shedding most of their workforce.
Modern shareholders+C-suites behavior reinforces this, however. Everything goes in the name of saving the quarterly report and making it look good and paying out your own bonuses.
Overhiring during covid is definitely a major part of it, combined with a slight investment bubble bursting
I don’t like calling it overhiring as if it was accidental or something. They didn’t hire thousands of people over covid thinking covid would never end, they just knew they could pick up people to fill the role for now and kick them to the curb as soon as they weren’t needed.
It wasn’t an oopsie, it was by design.
Another factor was the PPP and other “totally not bailouts” that were part of the COVID relief spending.
Of the roughly $800 billion dollars from PPP which was provided as uncollateralized, low-interest loans 66-77% went directly to companies and ~92% of those loans were completely forgiven.. In other words an ~5-600M bailout predicated on keeping positions open long enough to maintain plausible deniability that is what the goal was.
They’ll give corporations all the slack and handouts but look at those trying to feed their children and scrutinize every little detail. It’s so sad.
Yeah, here in Germany, workers have stronger protections, laying them off isn’t as easy, and I feel like the layoff waves have largely not occurred here, because companies didn’t hire so much during the pandemic.
Many people got hired during Covid.
Grow isn’t as expected, so now they are firing again.
But on the bright side, most of those companies still employ more people than pre-covid.
